Career path

Lara obtained her Master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Ghent University in 2021, where she completed her Master’s thesis in the group of Prof. Anne Willems (Laboratory of Microbiology). After a 6 month internship in the biotic stress group at KWS (Germany), she joined the group of Prof. Jane Parker in April 2022 at the department of Prof. Paul Schulze-Lefert in the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. As part of the DFG Priority Programme DECRyPT_2125, her PhD research focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying plant iron nutrition, centred on the interplay between plant roots-derived coumarins and fungal endophytes. She obtained her PhD degree in October 2025. Since 2026, Lara is a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Sofie Goormachtig (VIB–UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology). Her current research explores innovative strategies to strengthen legume–rhizobium symbioses. This includes the development of plant signalling molecules derived from poultry proteins as seed treatments to enhance nitrogen fixation in crops such as soybean, in collaboration with the company STAMAGRO.

I graduated in 2018 as a Master of Science in Biochemistry and Biotechnology at Ghent University, after which I performed my master thesis in the Rhizosphere group, investigating the function of parasitic KAI2 homologs in strigolactone signaling. In 2019, I then started my PhD to further unravel the KAI2 signaling pathway in Arabidopsis seeds and its role in seed germination, with a special interest in the function of the SMAX1 protein in all of this.

My career path

I am full professor at Ghent University and group leader at the VIB center of Plant Systems Biology in Belgium. I combine research and education because I think they cannot be separated and they strengthen each other. Hence, apart from my scientific activities, I am intensively involved in education and educational organization. 

My research career started in 1987 at the UGent focusing on how interactions between plant roots and neighboring organisms influence plant growth in a positive way.
Initially, the emphasis was on the symbiosis between legumes and rhizobia, resulting in the formation of new root organs, the nodules, in which the rhizobia reside and fix atmospheric nitrogen for the plant.  At that time, we studied the non-model symbiosis between the tropical legume Sesbania rostrata and the bacterium Azorhizobium caulinodans and could unravel the early signaling events and specific adaptations that have evolved to enable this peculiar nodulation upon water submergence. During my post-doc and early group leader career, we studied long-distance control of nodule organogenesis in the model legume Medicago truncatula and made significant contributions to understand how the nodule number is controlled.
During my early career, I went three times abroad for a prolonged period at the Laboratoire de Biologie des Sols, ORSTOM (Dakar, Sénégal) (Prof. Dreyfus), at the MSU-DOE, Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI, USA) (Prof. De Bruijn) and at the ETH-Zürich, Institute of Plant Sciences (Prof. Potrykus), providing me both international connections and abroad research experience.

In 2005, I became professor at the Ghent University in the currently named Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics. This department is also embedded in the VIB Center of Plant Systems Biology of the VIB. Since 2010, I am appointed full-time principal investigator of the Rhizosphere group at VIB. In my group, we still study the molecular communication between roots and rhizosphere microorganisms but the studies go beyond the rhizobia legume interaction as you can read from our web page. In 2017, I became full professor.

I find it very important that our basic research has valuable economic and societal relevance. Together with VIB colleagues, I am  very proud to have established the start-up Aphea.Bio (www.aphea.bio, 2017) focusing on the use of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria in agriculture. Recently, together with ILVO, I contributed to the start-up Protealis (https://www.protealis.com) aiming at the production of sustainable plant protein for Europe.