Maria Bednarczyk has started her PhD in the Magnus Kjærgaard lab as a Plant-PATH PhD student. She joins Plant-PATH from Jagiellonian University in Poland. Prior to joining the program, Maria completed a one-year research stay at the University of Virginia, USA, where she worked on the characterization of novel spin labels designed to study membrane potentials. In the Kjærgaard lab, she will focus on the disordered cytosolic region of the canonical PIN auxin transporters.

Lucas Wilson has also joined the Magnus Kjærgaard lab as a Plant-PATH PhD student. He joins Plant-PATH from the EMBL outstation in Grenoble, where he worked on MAGE-RING ligases and their interactions with the ubiquitination machinery. In the Kjærgaard lab, Lucas will study the role of disordered cytosolic regions in PIN auxin transporters. Prior to this, he worked at the Pirbright Institute on the cellular entry of Valley fever virus in mammalian and insect cells.

Johannes Busch is starting his PhD at Plant-PATH in the Martens Lab at Université de Bruxelles. His research will focus on the structures and functional mechanisms of the transport proteins LAX3, WAT1, and PIN8. Before joining Plant-PATH, Johannes completed both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Tübingen in Germany. During this time, he studied Kinesin-1 isoform motility parameters, the lipid composition of liquid nanoparticles, and also worked on projects in the field of immunology.