Realising your vision and achieving your goals while staying true to yourself can feel overwhelming, deeply complex, and lonely — but it doesn’t have to be.Through empathy, strategic questioning, and grounded challenge, I coach professionals to embrace their entrepreneurial spirit, gain clarity, overcome barriers, and navigate change with purposeful, value-driven steps to achieve lasting results.

At 2Blades we envision a world where growers access and embrace all safe and effective innovations for agricultural production to 1) satisfy the global food security and nutritional needs for human wellbeing, and 2) reduce the amount of land, water, and chemicals needed to meet these needs.2Blades will contribute to this future by translating cutting edge research on plant pests and diseases into novel, long-lasting solutions that will prevent severe crop losses. Targeting plant pest and diseases is a key lever to assure food security and prevent significant humanitarian and economic losses. It can furthermore reduce the need for crop protection compounds currently used to combat these challenges, which often come at significant costs to the environment and human health. As a 2Blades director and board member I contribute to the 2Blades strategic vision, and ensure we commit to our organizations core values; Trust, Autonomy, Professionalism and Responsibility.Next to my role as director I continue my role as principal investigator of the 2Blades group which is embedded in The Sainsbury Laboratory, a world-leading institute in the field of plant-microbe interactions. Within the 2Blades group we perform translational research leveraging the advanced understanding of molecular host-pathogen interactions at TSL to deliver new solutions against relevant plant diseases. These novel discoveries are subsequently developed into products for subsistence and commercial farmers via the 2Blades Foundation and key delivery partners.

Plant diseases regularly cause severe crop losses that devastate food production for millions of people. These losses can have enormous humanitarian and economic costs, and the use of crop protection compounds to combat disease can pose environmental and human health risks. Therefore, durable disease resistance solutions are required to assure food security. Within the 2Blades group, we perform translational research leveraging the advanced understanding of molecular host-pathogen interactions at TSL to deliver new solutions against relevant plant diseases. These novel discoveries are subsequently developed into products for subsistence and commercial farmers via the 2Blades Foundation and commercial partners.

In agricultural practice worldwide, plant diseases regularly cause severe crop losses that devastate food production for millions of people. In addition to the economic costs that amounts to billions of Euros, the use of fungicides to combat plant diseases poses significant environmental and human health risks. Furthermore, although agrochemicals are used successfully in developed countries, their cost often puts them beyond the reach of farmers in the less developed world. The current method of employing disease resistant varieties is often not effective in combating crop losses since pathogen populations evolve to overcome resistance in a few years. To sustain a growing world population, more durableand sustainable forms of disease resistance are required. The 2Blades' goal is to identify the best available technologies and strategies for developing durable resistance to important crop diseases. Within this framework, I aim to translate my basic knowledge about fungal effector biology into novel, more durable, breeding strategies.

Plant diseases cause severe crop losses worldwide with devastating effects on food and feed production. Vascular fungal pathogens are particularly notorious because they lack curative treatments and survive for decades in soil via persistent resting structures. The increased need to reduce the use of harmful pesticides and to develop novel control strategies requires in-depth understanding of the biology of vascular pathogens and the molecular mechanisms underlying pathogenicity and survival.In my research I used a multidisciplinary approach to functionally analyse the Verticillium secretome in order to reveal the most potent effectors in modulation of host immunity and microbial antagonism, and in turn provide potential novel targets for developing effective and sustainable disease control strategies.

Wageningen University and research centre, Ph.D. student Molecular Plant PathologyDuring my Ph. D., I have investigated small cysteine-rich effector proteins that are secreted by the fungal tomato leaf mould pathogen Cladosporium fulvum into the tomato leaf apoplast during infection. Initially, I performed a biochemical approach aiming to purify these effectors with their interacting host targets by affinity-tagging. However, this approach failed because the affinity-tagged fusion proteins were not stable in the plant. Various affinity tags were tested, but in all cases the approach did not work. Therefore, I abandoned this strategy and studied the effects of heterologous expression of C. fulvum effectors in tomato and Arabidopsis genetically, by employing microarrays. Also, the susceptibility of transformants to various pathogens was assessed. Furthermore, I used gene silencing to knock down expression of the effectors in C. fulvum in order to study fungal virulence. Using these techniques, I was able to demonstrate a contribution to fungal virulence and unravel the mode of action for a number of effectors. One of the effectors acts in self-defense by forming a “shield” to protect fungal hyphae against plant chitinases, while another effector disables proteases that are important for plant defense. My research has been published in several international refereed journals, and these publications were the first to reveal intrinsic functions of fungal effectors that are required for full pathogen virulence.