Phil Wigge started the lab in January 2005. Before moving to Norwich, Phil had been a junior group leader with Detlef Weigel at the MPI-Tuebingen following a 2 year postdoc at the Salk, also with Detlef. Phil came to plants after doing his Ph.D on budding yeast cell biology, in Cambridge where he learnt how hard biochemistry was. Phil has since taken up developmental genetics. Phil did his undergraduate work at Oxford University in the Biochemistry department. Phil got his start in molecular biology working as an undergraduate in Dave Sherratt's lab, studying site-specific recombination.
Andreas Magusin is a bioinformatician who does programming and computational biology for the whole site. Andreas is from Sweden, but grew up in New Zealand, where he did a masters in applied mathematics. Currently, Andreas is focussing on approaches to identify mutations through deep sequencing.
Katja Jaeger is a postdoc studying how plants make developmental decisions. Earlier, Katja carried out her Ph.D in the lab, and especially focussed on FT signalling. She comes from the South of Germany, where they have beautiful tall mountains and large forests (just like Norwich). Katja did her diploma in the lab of Gerd Juergens, at the ZMBP in Tuebingen where she studied mechanisms for developmental specificity in auxin signalling.
Silvia Alves is originally from Portugal and first came to the JIC as an Erasmus student to work with Wendy Harwood and then as a Marie Curie fellow with Philippe Vain. While helping Philippe improve Brachypodium transformation, she discovered the wonders of the UV microscope self-induced tan and she liked it so much that she decided to join our lab to set up developmental studies in Brachypodium. Silvia won an independent 4 year Ph.D scholarship from the Portuguese government; and although she likes Norwich, occasionally she needs to travel back to Lisboa to pamper her two precious cats.
Scott Boden is from down under. Scott did his Ph.D at the University of Adelaide, in Jason Able’s lab, where he characterised the TaASY1 gene in breadwheat. Here at JIC, Scott is working with Monika and Silvia to establish Brachypodium as a system for understanding temperature perception. Outside of the lab, Scott plays Australian rules football.
Subhasis Samanta is a postdoc from India. Subhasis did his PhD at International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi with Prof. Sudhir Kumar Sopory. During his PhD, he worked on a family of calcium binding transcriptional activators from rice and discovered a transcription factor which undergoes alternative splicing under stress. Subhasis is cloning new genes involved in temperature perception.
Charlotte Kirchhelle is a Masters student at the Technical University of Munich (TU Munchen), where she cut her teeth working with Kay Schneitz. Charlotte has joined us for an accelerated internship of 6 months and has taken on monster large-scale projects to identify natural variation in the ambient temperature response as well as work out how HSF1 works. We might need more than 6 months...Outside of the lab Charlotte is an accomplished sculpture and painter. Charlotte also takes an active interest in politics, and a local party executive member for the Social Democratic Party (SPD)
Nick Pullen is a Ph.D student working jointly with the Richard Morris group and the Wigge Lab. Nick got his degree in Mathematics from UEA, and instead of becoming enormously wealthy in the City of London, he decided he'd much rather model how plants achieve sharp expression boundaries during development. Nick grew up on a real farm, so unlike most of the rest of us, he knows about real crops.
Asif Khan Khattak is a joint PhD student with the Wigge lab and Alastair Grant at the UEA ENV school. Asif is from Peshawar, Pakistan and is here on a scholarship. Asif is using Paula Kover’s Arabidopsis thaliana MAGIC lines to isolate QTLs involved in temperature responses and growth. He is also interested in investigating the molecular/genetic basis of natural variation for growth related traits.