PhD candidate
During her BSc. at the University of Bremen, Felicia first came to Wageningen as an exchange student in the ERASMUS program. After obtaining her BSc. in Biology, she studied at the University of Bonn, and returned to Wageningen University and Research for the second year of her MSc. She holds a MSc. in Plant Sciences, with a minor in Entomology and Phytopathology. The evolution of plant resistance responses in plant-insect interactions has been her most important focus. Her master thesis on the evolution of the biosynthesis of specific diterpenes involved in plant defence was supervised by the chair groups of Plant Physiology and Bioinformatics. During her Research Master Practice in the chair group of Biosystematics, she studied the emergence and conservation of a resistance-gene cluster conferring resistance to specialist insect herbivores.
In her PhD project, she is investigating biosynthetic pathway evolution in the Brassicaceae family, under supervision of Prof. Marnix Medema, and co-supervised by Prof. Justin Van der Hooft in the chair group of Bioinformatics, and Prof. Klaas Bouwmeester and Prof. Eric Schranz in the chair group of Biosystematics. Capturing the evolutionary dynamics of compound diversity in plant secondary metabolism via integration of genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics data resources is the underlying principle of her approach. Her fields of interests are plant biochemistry, biosynthetic pathway evolution, comparative genomics, metabolic profiling, resistance breeding & synthetic biology.
Embedded in the Bioinformatics Group of the Plant Sciences Group at WUR 