Clara Sanchez-Rodriguez

Clara Sánchez-Rodríguez is Assistant Professor of Plant Cell Biology at ETH Zurich since April 2015, and co-chair of the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (ETHZ) since February 2017. She has a Master in Agronomy from Polytechnic University of Madrid, where she also obtained her PhD on plant resistance to necrotrophic fungi (supervised by A. Molina). During a short visit to Sommervilles´ labs, she was fascinated by plant cell walls. Thus, her postdoctoral research focused on the mechanisms of cellulose synthesis in plants (at S. Persson´s group), pioneering the fields of cellulose synthesis regulation by hormones and vesicle trafficking. She is one of the leader discoverers of the TPLATE complex, a clathrin-mediated endocytosis adaptor essential in plants, but not present in animals and yeast. This achievement was honoured by the Jeff Schell Award for Plant Scientists. Her independent research at ETHZ focuses on the molecular basis of plant-pathogen communication at the plant apoplast (i.e, plant cell walls). Employing molecular and cell biology methods, her group studies the plant cell wall role in the intercellular growth of vascular fungi.