Brigitte Poppenberger

Brigitte Poppenberger is a professor at the TUM School of Life Sciences of the Technical University of Munich in Germany. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, was an Erwin-Schrödinger postdoctoral fellow at the University of York, UK and a group leader at the Max Perutz Laboratories in Vienna, before moving to TUM. She is internationally recognized for her work on the function of hormones in the growth and stress responses of plants and has published several high impact scientific publications in this area. She won prices for her research and her teaching, where she is very active also on the organizational side, heading one TUM BSc and two TUM MSc study programs and the third party-funded doctoral college ‘The Proteomes that Feed the World’, as a co-speaker. In her research Poppenberger and her team investigate how the steroid hormones brassinosteroids (BRs) take part in plant development and stress resistance, with an emphasis on responses to temperature extremes and their effects on growth and immunity. The group tests for transferability of discoveries made in model species to crops, using biotechnological and classical plant breeding approaches, and interacts with plant breeders from academia and industry to generate new crop cultivars that bring benefits in terms of yield quality and yield stability.