Valentina Ivanova

Ms. Ivanova's education and work centers mainly around plant breeding and phytopathology. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Horticulture and Viticulture and a Master's degree in Plant Protection and was able to hone her skills in pathogen infection assays, planning and performing greenhouse experiments and data analyses. During her internship at the Department of Plant Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology at West Pomeranian University of Technology her work focused on the identification of novel dwarfing genes and QTL mapping in rye. Later she joined the Center of Plant Systems Biology and Biotechnology (CPSBB) as laboratory manager where her team was responsible for the establishment of germplasm collection, identification and exploitation of the most promising candidates via marker-assisted selection and molecular analyses of resistance genes. As part of a previous MSCA staff exchange project, RESIST (https://resist.cpsbb.eu/) Ms. Ivanova focused on elucidating the mechanisms of action of different seaweed-based biostimulants which can be employed to enhance crop quality and abiotic stress tolerance. Her work relied heavily on the combined use of multi-trait high-throughput phenotyping and -omic technologies that are capable of detecting changes in the plant's physiology and modulation of gene expression.

Now, under CropPrime, she participates in an interdisciplinary secondment to VIB-UGent, where she continues the work initiated by Mihail Angelov with fucoidan as well as the Prom:LUC Arabidopsis library.