PhD candidate
Elena holds an MSc in Plant Sciences with specialisation in Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources from Wageningen University. She obtained her BSc in Agricultural Sciences at the University of Pisa, holding a full Honors scholarship in Agriculture and Plant Biotechnologies at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies. She conducted her MSc thesis in the groups of Plant Breeding and Biometris (Mathematics and Statistics) on genomic prediction in potato, while working part-time as a Research Assistant in the EU H2020 project INVITE (Innovations in Plant Variety Testing in Europe). During her internship in Sue Rhee’s Lab at Carnegie Institution for Sciences, Stanford, she investigated the relationship between chromatin contacts and the involvement of genes in the specialised biosynthetic pathways across plant species.
Since September 2023, Elena has been a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Marnix Medema and Dr. Justin van der Hooft in the Bioinformatics Group at Wageningen University. During her PhD project, Elena will develop an automated computational workflow to discover plant natural products and new multi-omics strategies for characterising and annotating plant specialised pathways and metabolites.
Embedded in the Bioinformatics Group of the Plant Sciences Group at WUR 