LS (Lucy) Perez Borroto, PhD

I'm a plant scientist with a fascination for life sciences, technology and education. I began my education in Cuba, my home country, with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, followed by one in Biology. During these years, I became especially interested in how plants (and crops) balance reproduction and survival under unfavourable environments. Halfway through a Master's in Agrobiotechnology, I was awarded a Latinoamerican PhD fellowship and moved to Argentina to pursue a PhD in plant biology and phenotyping. My doctoral studies focused on investigating the effects of brassinosteroids in the modulation of growth-defence dynamics in Arabidopsis and soybeans, especially under low water availability. At the end of my third year of PhD, I joined Wageningen University's Plant Breeding group as a postdoc focusing on potato pheno/genotyping under drought. Currently, I'm a researcher at the Breeding for Abiotic Stress Tolerance group (Wageningen Plant Research), investigating plant responses to environmental factors such as water availability (drought and flooding), day length, temperature and humidity interactions, and low nitrogen availability. I'm passionate about education, student supervision (MSc and PhD), developing high-tech phenotyping tools, and helping to form the next generation of plant scientists.