Paula Casati. Centro de Estudios Fotosintéticos y Bioquímicos (CEFOBI), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)-Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Rosario, Argentina. Paula Casati was born in 1971 in Rosario (Argentina), and also grew up and now lives in Rosario. She studied Biotechnology in the Faculty of Biochemistry (UNR), from 1990-1994, where she did her undergraduate Thesis at the CEFOBI, investigating the metabolism of C4 compounds in plants. Then, she did her PhD Thesis at the same Institute from 1995-1998, where she continued her research on C4 metabolism. She also then started investigating the effect of UV-B radiation in plants during 2 short visits to Dr. Gerald Edwards lab at the Washington State University, USA. In 2001, and after a short postdoctorate at the CEFOBI, she joined the lab of Dr. Virginia Walbot at the Department of Biology, Stanford University, as a postdoctoral student from 2001-2005. During her postdoctoral training, she characterized different pathways affected after UV-B exposure in maize, including changes in secondary metabolism, in the translation machinery and in the chromatin. By use of different maize inbreds and landraces, as well as transgenic plants with altered expression of genes participating in diverse UV-B responses, she could identify several new participants in the plants responses to this radiation. In 2005, Paula came back to Argentina, where she started her lab investigating different aspects of UV-B responses in plants species, including maize and Arabidopsis. The different areas of her current research are flavonoid metabolism and regulation in maize, chromatin remodeling after UV-B exposure, cell cycle regulation and development regulation by UV-B, and the investigation of ribosomal proteins roles after exposure to this radiation.
