Uta Paszkowski

Uta Paszkowski is Professor for Plant Molecular Genetics at the Department of Plant Sciences of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where she leads the Cereal Symbiosis Group; she is at the same time Team Leader at the Centre for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) at RIKEN Yokohama, where she directs the RIKEN-Cambridge Joint Crop Symbiosis Research Team. She did her undergraduate studies at the University Cologne, Germany, gaining a Master (Diplom) degree in phytopathology at the Max-Planck Institute for Plant Breeding. Her PhD she received in Plant Biotechnology from the ETH-Zurich, Switzerland. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University Basel, Switzerland, where she initiated the work on arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, and then became a Staff Scientist at the Syngenta Torrey Mesa Research Institute, San Diego, USA. As a junior group leader, she started her own academic research group at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and joined the Department of Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Lausanne as a Swiss National Science Foundation Professoral Fellow before becoming faculty member at the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, in 2012. Awards include elected Member to the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2020, elected Member of the German Academy of Sciences, the ‘Leopoldina’ in 2023 and elected Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in 2025.