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Kajala Kaisa - VIB Conferences

Kaisa Kajala

Utrecht University, NL
Biography

Dr. Kaisa Kajala’s research passion is cell types: how they are specified, how they integrate environmental cues into their developmental regulatory networks, and how these networks evolve. Dr. Kajala is originally from Finland, where she grew up on the countryside. This provided her a deep fascination of plants and a desire to travel the world. Dr. Kajala obtained both her undergraduate degree as well as her PhD from University of Cambridge. For her PhD, she studied the cell type specificity determinants and their evolution with respect to C4 photosynthesis in the group of Dr. Julian Hibberd. During her postdoc period, she explored the world with short postdoctoral stays at University of Eastern Finland, International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and Plant Energy Biology at University of Western Australia. Then she embarked on her main postdoc work was at University of California, Davis in the group of Dr. Siobhan Brady. There she worked on tomato root cell type specific gene expression patterns and the root responses to flooding and drought. Since 2017, Dr. Kajala has been an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research combines the curiosity about evolution and applies cell type specific functional genomics tools, to understand various cell types, with the current main research focus being the root barrier cell type exodermis.

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