© HANS HOCHSTÖGERGrowing up in Morocco, Youssef Belkhadir would look out across the wheat fields of his father’s farm outside Casablanca in wonder. “I was fascinated by how plants managed to colonize the environment in such an elegant way, making the most of everything,” Belkhadir tells The Scientist. “They are tethered in the ground and cannot escape their environment through locomotion. Their site of birth will be their site of death, and they have to deal with whatever comes their way.”
Inspired by this idea, Belkhadir decided to study the molecular biology of plants as an undergraduate at the University of Paris VI-Jussieu. After receiving his bachelor’s in 2001, he spent another year at the University of Paris-Sud XI earning his master’s degree in plant genomics, before moving to the U.S. to join biologist Jeffery Dangl’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his PhD. There, Belkhadir investigated how plants sense and defend themselves against pathogen attack using molecular machines inside each cell.1 “Even then, Youssef was very big-thinking and tenacious,” Dangl recalls.
After earning his PhD in 2005, Belkhadir joined the lab of biologist Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, as a research associate, ...
