Éva Kondorosi

Éva Kondorosi

Bio: Eva Kondorosi is the current chair of Class C (Life Sciences), Vice President (ex officio) and board member of the Academia Europaea. She was also one of the seven members of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors of the European Commission.
Her primary research field is Rhizobium-legume symbiosis and symbiotic nitrogen fixation with a recent focus on plant-controlled differentiation of bacteria. Her work opened up many new research areas including chemical ecology (communication of plants and bacteria by chemical and peptide signals), plant organ development, cell differentiation and fighting antimicrobial resistance. She has discovered hundreds of unique peptides in legume symbiotic cells representing a gold mine of biological activities. Her research aims to understand the role of these peptides in symbiosis and to develop effective new drugs from them for medicine and agriculture. Her expertise is very broad in the fields of microbiology, plant development biology, cell cycle control, bacterial and host communication, molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry and omics. Recently, she was a lead advisor on cancer screening recommendations of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission.
For her original discoveries, she has received several prestigious awards including the Balzan Prize and the Széchenyi Prize. She is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Academia Europaea, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the French Academy of Agriculture, the European Academy of Microbiology and the European Molecular Biology Organization. She was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Scientific Advisory Board as well as a member and Vice President of the European Research Council. To know more, please visit kondorosi-symbiosis.eu

Affiliation: Institute of Plant Biology, Biological Research Centre, Szeged, Hungary