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NEWS On Tuesday this week, Catherine Bellini was awarded the Roséns Linnaeus Prize in Botany by the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund. She received the prize for her research on adventitious roots and carbon allocation and her strong commitment to promoting international scientific collaboration. Catherine Bellini shares the award with Alexandre Antonelli, professor at the University of Gothenburg.
Catherine Bellini combines research in Sweden and France to advance understanding of plant growth and adaptation.
ImageMattias PetterssonCatherine Bellini’s research spans two main areas, reflecting her dual affiliation: she is professor at Umeå University and Director of Research in Sylvie Dinant’s group at the Jean-Pierre Bourgin Institute (IJPB), part of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) in Versailles, France.
In Umeå, Catherine Bellini and her team study how plants develop adventitious roots - roots that grow from stems or leaves, such as those formed when new plants are grown from stem cuttings. They identified key genes controlling this process in the small model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and applied this knowledge to trees such as hybrid aspen, hybrid poplar and Norway spruce, which are important species for forestry.
In France, her research focusses on how plants transport sugars and allocate carbon, processes that are essential for growth and survival. She investigates how these mechanisms influence plant development and help plants adapt to their environment.
This award recognises more than twenty years of teamwork. I would therefore like to thank all the students and postdocs who joined my group and contributed.
Using her dual roles, Catherine Bellini has coordinated long-term collaborations between Umeå Plant Science Centre and INRAE. This collaboration was later expanded to the trilateral INUPRAG cooperation which also includes the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics in Barcelona. These partnerships have strengthened international research collaborations, enabled the exchange of young scientists and resulted in more than 200 scientific publications.
“I am very honoured to receive this prize”, says Catherine Bellini. “This award recognises more than twenty years of teamwork. I would therefore like to thank all the students and postdocs who joined my group and contributed. I would also like to thank Umeå Plant Science Centre and the IJPB at INRAE for the excellent research environment they provided us with.”
The Roséns Linnaeus Prizes in Botany and Zoology have been awarded every three years since 1935 to researchers who are resident in Sweden who are considered highly deserving by the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund. This year’s prizes were presented at the society’s annual meeting in Lund on December 2nd.
