Biography

Teva Vernoux is a CNRS Research director in Plant biology at ENS de Lyon. He leads the "hormonal signalling and development" team in RDP institute which he has also run since 2016, where he was deputy director in 2014-2015.

Born in 1973, Teva Vernoux studied in Paris, at École normale supérieure. In 2002, he supported a thesis at Université Paris 11 – cell differentiation in the shoot apex of Arabidopsis thaliana: The role of polarized transport of auxin – a study conducted at the INRA in Versailles under the supervision of Jan Traas.

An expert in plant development biology, Teva Vernoux conducts original multidisciplinary projects combining biological experiments on living tissues and modeling.

With his team, he is particularly interested in the role of hormonal signals in the self-organization of development systems. For this he uses the shoot apical meristem, the tissue that builds plant stems and their geometric organization, to understand, at different scales, how biological systems acquire self-construction properties. His research also builds on the development of innovative tools and has developed a sensor for visualization in vivo of one of the most important plant hormones, auxin, in plants. His research is based on a network of international collaboration with major players in the field of plants.

He is also interested in the societal implications of his research with applications in agriculture for the monitoring of small crops, he is one of the partners of the project H2020 ROMI - Robotics for micro farms initiated in 2018; and architecture for the Design of biomimetic buildings.

Teva Vernoux is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant 2022 for his project TEMPO - How plant cells set the tempo of rhythmic shoot construction in plants.