Thomas Ott

University of Freiburg Faculty of Biology

Talk title: Visualizing and understanding rhizobia infections

Thomas studied biology at the Universities of Göttingen (Germany) and Manchester (UK). He did his doctoral thesis in the group of Michael Udvardi at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm (Germany) from 2001-2005 before he obtained a postdoctoral Marie-Curie Fellowship of the European Union to conduct a two-years project (2006-2007) at the Laboratoire des Interactions Plantes Micro-organismes (LIPM), INRA-CNRS in Toulouse (France) in the lab of Pascal Gamas and Andreas Niebel. In 2008, he moved as a junior group leader to the University of Munich (LMU) into the department of Martin Parniske. After being awarded an Emmy-Noether Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in October 2009, he started his independent lab in the same place. Thomas then followed the appointments as a professor at the LMU in 2015 and moved in October 2016 to the University of Freiburg where he currently holds the chair in Plant Cell Biology and focusses his research on the intracellular infection of legumes roots by bacteria.