Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Alice Pajoro

Alice Pajoro, first author of Mutagenesis of a Quintuple Mutant Impaired in Environmental Responses Reveals Roles for CHROMATIN REMODELING4 in the Arabidopsis Floral Transition

Current Position: post-doctoral researcher

Education: PhD in molecular biology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands; MSc in plant biotechnology at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy

Non-scientific interests: travelling and sightseeing, doing jigsaw puzzles and making jewelry

Brief bio: I study the molecular biology of plant development and my research focuses on the interplay between transcription factors and chromatin state in the regulation of gene expression. During my BSc, I worked on Zea mays leaf development in the group of G. Gavazzi and during my MSc I worked on rice spikelet development in the laboratory of M. Kater at the Università degli Studi di Milano. In 2009, I joined the group of G. Angenent at Wageningen University (WUR) as a Marie Curie fellow within the SYSFLO network. My PhD project in K. Kaufmann’s group focused on the regulation of gene transcription during flower development. For my first post-doc, I worked with R. Immink at WUR, where I studied the role of ambient temperature in the regulation of floral transition in Arabidopsis. In 2017, I received an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship to join the group of G. Coupland at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany. This project aimed to identify novel components in the regulation of floral transition and resulted in the publication of this article. I will shortly move back to Italy to work as a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Pathology (IBPM) within the National Research Council of Italy (CNR).