I received my Ph.D. degree in Plant Molecular Genetics, which I performed in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Maryland (USA) through a scientific collaboration project with Cairo University (Egypt). The first keystone of my professional career was when I worked at the centre of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at College Park, Maryland (USA), funded by a Fulbright fellowship, where I acquired my first expertise in the application of computational biology. The second keystone was my mission at the Laboratory for Plant-Microbe Interactions (LIPM) at the INRA in Toulouse (France), awarded by the French Embassy at Cairo and the Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF), where I had the opportunity to develop my academic independence. At KU Leuven, I worked as a senior post-doc in the faculty of bioscience engineering. I studied the interaction between plants and their surrounding microbial communities using state-of-the-art functional genomics and transcriptomics, bioinformatics, and molecular biology techniques. I aimed to understand how plant-microbe communities can cope with unfavourable environmental conditions and develop new crop protection strategies with this knowledge.