I am an assistant professor at the Plant-Microbe Interactions department at Utrecht University. My research broadly focuses on plant - microbe interactions, emphasizing on both pathogenic and beneficial ones. Brief summary of research I completed my Ph.D. research in November 2012 at Wageningen University with honors. Here I studied the role and evolution of fungal effectors during plant pathogenesis under the supervision of Prof. Pierre de Wit and Dr. Bart Thomma (current chair Phytopathology Wageningen UR). I investigated the role and evolution of fungal effectors from the tomato pathogenic fungi Cladosporium fulvum and Verticillium dahliae. During colonization, both fungi secrete effectors that contribute to virulence. We showed that Ecp6 contributes to virulence by sequestering chitin oligosaccharides that otherwise elicit host immunity. In tomato, resistance towards race 1 isolates of V. dahliae is governed by Ve1, and we undertook an innovative next-generation sequencing approach to identify the corresponding avirulence gene. Computational analyses successively led to the identification of the race 1-specific gene Ave1. Ave1 activates Ve1-mediated resistance and contributes to fungal virulence. Similar to the region carrying Ave1, we identified multiple genomic regions with limited distribution among V. dahliae strains that coincide with large-scale interruptions of chromosome synteny and are enriched for effectors. This work led to several publications in leading international peer-reviewed journals. As a postdoc at the VIB Plant Systems Biology department, I studied the genomes of plant pathogenic fungi. In collaboration with Melvin Bolton (USDA, Fargo) we used bioinformatics to infer the evolutionary history of toxin biosynthetic gene clusters in the sugarbeet pathogen Cercospora beticola.