Bo Xu is now a Group Leader at the prestigious CAS Institute of Botany in Bejing: Bo joined the lab in 2016 following a post-doctoral fellowship and PhD from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST). He is interested in the mechanisms and genetic changes underlying the occurrence of adaptive events and innovations during colonization of land by early plants. He obtained his PhD by elucidating a conserved gene regulatory network for water-conducting cell formation in land plants. His project in our lab focussed on understanding the origin of plant cuticle and the mechanisms of spem release in mosses.
Ross Mounce is now the Director of Open Access Programmes at the Arcadia Foundation: Ross joined the lab in 2016 following a PhD at the University of Bath were his thesis focussed on the rol eof morphology in anlayses of evolutionary relationships that include fossil species. He was subseqently a Software sustainability Fellow and Panton Fellow for Open Data in Science. He research with us focussed on analysing the contents of the global network of botanic gardens to evaluate their potential and biases in support of ex-situ plant conservtaion.
Tao Feng is now a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Wuhan Botanical Gardens: Tao Feng joined the lab in 2015 as a part of his PhD at the Wuhan Botanical Gardens . He was awarded a two year visiting research placement by the China Scholarship Council to join the lab. Tao led our efforts to extract RNA of up to 500 species of Caryophyllales that we are collecting from around the world, and cultivating in the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens. He was one of the lead authors in our paper that characterised the convergent evolution of betalain biosynthesis in Caryophyllales.
Boas Pucker is now Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Bielefeld: Boas began his PhD as part of Beta vulgaris (sugar beet) sequencing consortium. He did a 6-month placement as DAAD visiting scholar in our lab in 2018. He is experienced in the genomics of sugar beet and has as-sembled and annotated a further six genomes across Caryophyllales. His PhD work focused on the flavonoid biosynthesis pathway but he also was part of the team that characterized the convergent evolution of betalain pathways. He has diverse skills in computational biology including comparative genome analysis, RNA-seq, and co-expression network approaches.