Inge De Clercq graduated in 2007 as Bio-engineer at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University. In the same year, she obtained an IWT PhD fellowship in the Oxidative Stress Signaling group to unravel the signal transduction pathways between the mitochondria and the nucleus during abiotic and biotic stress (in collaboration with the Lab of Phytopathology, Prof. Monica Höfte). During her PhD, she performed research during two months at the University of Western Australia (ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology). In 2013, she obtained her PhD and started a post-doctoral project in collaboration with Bayer Bioscience on the identification of key regulators of stress tolerance in Arabidopsis and on comparative transcriptomics in crops. In 2014, she moved to Melbourne to join the research group of Prof. Jim Whelan at La Trobe University to further elucidate the role of mitochondria and chloroplast retrograde in stress signaling. In the same year, she was granted an FWO Postdoctoral fellowship to continue on the retrograde project in a joint collaboration between the Van Breusegem and Whelan lab.
