Dr. Martin Bayer (Group Leader)
Martin studied Biology at the Universities of Mainz and Hohenheim in Germany, supported by the German National Academic Foundation. He did his PhD thesis on engineering reversible male sterility in transgenic wheat in the lab of Dieter Hess at the University of Hohenheim. For his postdoctoral studies, he joined the lab of Wolfgang Lukowitz at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA. Supported by a fellowship of the German Science Foundation (DFG), he worked on cell polarity and early pattern formation in the Arabidopsis embryo. For a 6-month period, he joined the lab of Ueli Grossniklaus at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He then moved to the Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen as a group leader in the Department of Cell Biology in 2009. Since 2022, he is a Group Leader and Heisenberg Fellow at the Center for Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Tübingen.
Houming Chen (PhD student)
Houming got his Bachelor’s Degree at Nanjing Forestry University (China) and received the basic scientific training during the Master’s period at College of Life Sciences in Zhejiang University (China).
Houming’s research interest lies in transcriptional regulatory networks downstream of receptor kinase signaling cascades during plant embryogenesis and other cell differentiation processes. He wants to understand principle similarities in their architecture and context-specific modifications.
He is spending his spare time with jogging and ping-pong for fun and he is a big fan of cooking and enjoying great dishes with friends☺.
Yingjing Miao (PhD student)
Miao received her Master’s degree at Zhejiang University in China. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology supported by the China Scholarship Council and the Max Planck Society.
Miao’s research interest focuses on the maternal-to-zygotic transition in Arabidopsis. She is characterizing novel paternally contributed factors involved in fertilization and early embryogenesis.
Apart from SNP calling, she also enjoys climbing, jogging and reading (besonders schöne Kinderbücher auf Deutsch).
Steffi Zimmermann (lab technician)
Bayer lab 