Catalina Baldwin

Biography

Catalina is a MPhil by research student in the Cereal Symbiosis group, investigating the nutrient-dependent regulation of plant development and fungal symbiosis in rice. She is passionate about the interconnected plant-microbe dynamics that establish the holobiont, including plant-pathogen interactions, the regulation of arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, and the sophisticated molecular mechanisms that underpin them. She is professionally motivated by the role of research-based technologies in informing agricultural sustainability.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in plant sciences from the University of Bristol, where her final-year projects included a literature review critically examining plant damage-sensing and intracellular signalling, and a practical research project involving a complementation study in Arabidopsis thaliana which explored the evolutionary context of root hydrotropic response genes. She has additional experience in molecular genetics approaches, including virus-induced gene silencing and molecular cloning. At the Plant Immunity Lab, University of Bristol, she completed a 6-month placement investigating wound-triggered immunity in Nicotiana benthamiana, supervised by Dr Pierre Buscaill and partially funded by the British Society for Plant Pathology. Following this, she joined Dr Ka-Wai Ma’s lab at the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, where she worked on developing combinatorial CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology in rice.