Bio
Dr. Giovanni Bubici got Ph.D. in plant pathology in 2006. He studies the microbiome of agricultural soils. His research is focused on soil-borne plant pathogens, such as Verticillium dahliae, Pyrenochaeta lycopersici, and Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense, and plant beneficial microorganisms like Streptomyces spp., especially in crops such as tomato, eggplant, olive, and banana. He isolates, selects, and tests streptomycetes as potential biological control agents and studies their modes of action. Also, he deepens the knowledge of microbe-microbe interactions by microbiological and molecular approaches to develop tailor-made microbial consortia. Dr. Bubici identified new resistance sources against V. dahliae in eggplant, artichoke, olive and strawberry, P. lycopersici in tomato, and Leveillula taurica in eggplant. Moreover, he studies the plant-pathogen interactions and functional genomics of Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) and Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) in tomato. Dr. Bubici has bioinformatics skills for analyzing metagenomics, transcriptomics, small-RNA data, and microbe’s genome assembling. Furthermore, he has competencies in parametric and nonparametric statistics applied to agriculture and uses the R software for the analyses. Dr. Bubici does an intense peer-review activity and is editor of several scientific journals such as Australasian Plant Pathology (Springer), Pathogens (MDPI), Horticulturae (MDPI), and Frontiers in Agronomy.

Bio
Professor Epaminondas Paplomatas (Male) is the Director of the Laboratory of Plant Pathology of the Department of Crop Science, Agricultural University of Athens (AUA), Greece. He has served as Vice Rector for Academic Affairs and Personnel for eight years at AUA and he is at present the Head of the Crop Science Department. He received his PhD in 1991 from the Department of Plant Pathology, University of California-Davis, USA. He has participated in 26 competitive international and 21 national research projects; he has organized 14 national and international congresses and working groups, has attended over 60 international and 30 national congresses, scientific meetings, group meetings and workshops; he has been invited as a speaker at 19 conferences and chaired 6 sessions and 2 round tables; he has visited 26 Universities and Research Institutes outside Greece; he has reviewed over 60 research papers, he is a member of 6 scientific societies and has participated in over 20 committees; he has published 66 research papers in international peer reviewed scientific journals (h-index=24) with more than 1530 citations (Scopus, April 2021), 18 full papers in conferences and 180 presentations in congresses. He has been involved in various research topics of innovative integrative management strategies of important plant pathogens with special focus on vascular wilt diseases (biological control, host-pathogen interactions, pathogenicity mechanisms, taxonomy). He has participated in 40 European Union (LIFE+, TEMPUS etc) and national funded research projects.

Bio
Dr. Steven J. Klosterman received a PhD in Plant Pathology in 2002 from Washington State University, in Pullman, Washington and conducted his postdoctoral work in the Plant Pathology Department at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Since 2006, Dr. Klosterman has been employed as a scientist the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, Crop Improvement and Protection Research Unit in Salinas, California. His work in Salinas primarily focuses on downy mildews and Verticillium wilt of spinach and lettuce and pathogen genetics. Dr. Klosterman is recognized internationally for his work on Peronospora effusa and Verticillium dahliae. He has served on the International Verticillium Steering Committee since 2009, as a Senior Editor for Phytopathology, and currently as the associate Editor-In-Chief of PhytoFrontiers.

Bio
After studying Plant Pathology at Wageningen University in the Netherland, Bart Thomma received a PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium on immune signalling pathways in Arabidopsis for a thesis describing that, besides salicylic acid, also jasmonate and ethylene play major roles in defence against pathogens. From 2003 onwards he has established a career at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, starting as postdoc, through assistant and associate professor to become full professor and head of department in 2013. This is where he started to develop his work on the vascular wilt pathogen Verticillium dahliae. In 2020, Bart Thomma was awarded a Humboldt professorship to become professor of Evolutionary Microbiology at the University of Cologne in Germany and at the “Centre of Excellence on Plant Science” (CEPLAS), where he moved his research group. Bart Thomma received the first RKS Wood Prize, awarded by the British Society for Plant Pathology, and acts as section editor for the journal PLoS Pathogens and as co-editor-in-chief of FEMS Microbiology Reviews.