Clara Gambart

Ir. Clara Gambart is a Ph.D. student at the Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement at KU Leuven, Belgium. She obtained in 2019 her master's degree in agricultural sciences at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering (KU Leuven, Belgium). During her master thesis, she investigated the potential agroecological intensification strategies on the profitability, productivity, and sustainability of banana-based systems in Uganda. This project gave her the opportunity to examine local banana farms in-depth and analyze key obstacles smallholder farmers are facing. Triggered by this experience she started a Ph.D. to thoroughly understand the physiological mechanisms behind plant stress/tolerance/quality and aims to map the phenotypic banana diversity in relation to the environment by combining genomics with phenotyping at the plant and cellular level.