Affiliation: Department of Plant Anatomy, ELTE – Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, HU
Keywords: Biophysics, Cell biology, Photosynthesis, Physiology, Plant biology, Plastid ultrastructure, SANS, Stress, TEM
Full profile:
Katalin Solymosi is a plant biologist who graduated and obtained her PhD at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Budapest, Hungary), where she actually works as assistant professor at the Department of Plant Anatomy. She is teaching various aspects of plant cell biology, anatomy, physiology and pharmaceutical botany at all levels of education (BSc, MSc, PhD) at Eötvös Loránd University and also at Semmelweis University (Budapest), and was invited lecturer at the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France (2006-2010, 1 month each academic year).
Besides a relatively heavy teaching load, her research is actually focused on the effects of biotic and abiotic stress (e.g. salt and drought stress) on plastid structure and function with emphasis on photosynthesis. In addition, her research interests include medicinally important metabolites produced by plastids and natural food colorings. She spent 6 years on maternity leave with her two children, during which she was involved in several national and international collaborations (with Prof. Benoit Schoefs at the University of Burgundy and later at the University of Le Mans, FR; with Prof. Cornelia Spetea Wiklund and Prof. Henrik Aronsson at Gothenburg University, SE, and Dr. Beata Mysliwa-Kurdziel at the Jagiellonian University, PL), and prepared several reviews and book chapters. After returning from maternity leave, she started her own lab with the help of national grants. She is actually supervising 2 PhD students and 3 MSc students.
She was awarded by several national scientific societies (e.g. Hungarian Biophysical Society, Hungarian Society for Microscopy, Hungarian Society for Plant Anatomy), and by the l’ORÉAL-UNESCO Women in Science national scholarship. She is a member of the editorial board of Botany Letters since 2013, and is actually the head of the Section of Photobiology of the Hungarian Biophysical Society.
She is a founding member of the Hungarian Young Academy, and member of its first board (2019-2020). She took part in the analyses of the first survey on young scientists in Hungary. She is devoted to public dissemination of science by papers, facebook posts and programs related to Researchers’ Night, Fascination of Plants Day. She also likes to link science and arts, won different prizes at various microscopy photo contests and had several individual and collective exhibitions of microscopic images.