News

Roxanne Sicat and Daniel Cincura graduated today from their MRes degrees at Imperial College London.

Roxanne earned a distinction for her MRes in Molecular Plant and Microbial Sciences. She is starting a DPhil at the University of Oxford with Dr Elena Baena-Gonzalez.

Daniel completed his MRes in Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and is continuing his PhD in the Kourelis Lab.

Zelah Smith joined the lab for her MSc Applied Biosciences and Biotechnology dissertation at Imperial College London. She continues to an ERC-funded PhD in the lab on completion of the MSc.

Jiorgos received an AI / Lab Automation Pivot Fellowship from the Imperial I-X Centre for AI in Science. The fellowship’s discretionary budget supported the lab’s purchase of a Bambu Lab H2C 3D printer (see Resources → Lab equipment), which the lab uses to design and produce custom equipment and to print physical models of NLR receptors and other protein structures for teaching and visualisation.

Cian Raza joined the lab for his MRes Molecular Plant and Microbial Sciences at Imperial College London. He continues to a URF-funded PhD in the lab on completion of the MRes.

Jiorgos delivered the Rank Prize New Lecturer talk — “From understanding to engineering: synthetic biology approaches to build made-to-order plant immune receptors” — at the MONOGRAM annual meeting (UK cereal and grasses research community), Cambridge, UK.

Jiorgos gave an invited talk — “From understanding to engineering: synthetic biology approaches to build made-to-order plant immune receptors” — at the 33rd Fungal Genetics Conference at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, and co-chaired the session “Fungal adaptation to infection-relevant traits” with Damian Krysan (Iowa Science Academy). The conference ran 17–22 March 2026.

Nick Eilmann and Daniel Cincura presented lab work at the annual SchoBozKa meeting on 19 February 2026. SchoBozKa is the joint annual retreat of six plant immunity research groups: Sebastian Schornack (Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University, SLCU), Tolga Bozkurt (Imperial College London), Sophien Kamoun (The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich), Lida Derevnina (Crop Science Centre, Cambridge University), Philip Carella (John Innes Centre), and Jiorgos Kourelis (Imperial College London).

The European Research Council Starting Grant formally begins. The five-year programme supports the lab’s research on engineering plant immune receptors with new pathogen specificities.

Lulu Cullen joined the lab for her MRes Synthetic and Systems Biology at Imperial College London.

The ARIA Programmable Plants Opportunity Seed award — “Programmable Plant Immunity by Design” — formally begins. Jiorgos is Co-Investigator on the three-year programme (2 October 2025 – 1 October 2028).

Three new PhD students joined the lab: Daniel Cincura on 1 October 2025 (Department of Life Sciences PhD), Cecilia Longoni on 13 October 2025 (Grantham Institute PhD), and Liu Qijun on 13 October 2025.

Qoqo Qiu joined on 13 October 2025 for her MRes in Molecular Plant and Microbial Sciences.

The Royal Society University Research Fellowship formally begins. The eight-year fellowship supports Jiorgos’s independent research programme at Imperial College London.

Nick Eilmann won two British Society for Plant Pathology prizes for 2025: the prize for examination performance in plant pathology, and the prize for best undergraduate research in plant pathology at Imperial College London. The awards were presented at the BSPP annual meeting.

Saskia Jenkins and Nick Eilmann started as Research Assistants in the lab, jointly with the Bozkurt lab. Nick had previously completed a Year 3 UG research project in the lab from April to June 2025.

Jiorgos co-chaired the session “Structure-informed synthetic biology: from design to function” with Mark Banfield (John Innes Centre) at the IS-MPMI 2025 Congress in Cologne, Germany. The congress ran 13–17 July 2025 at the Confex Conference and Exhibition Centre.

Polly Dean joined the lab for an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme (UROP) summer project at Imperial College London.

Jiorgos gave an invited online lecture — “Bioengineering plant immune receptors for disease resistance” — in the MSc course “Breeding for resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses” at the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece.

Jiorgos delivered an invited seminar on Pikobodies at SNP2Prot, hosted at the Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzenbiochemie (IPB), Halle, Germany.

Jiorgos gave an invited Pikobodies seminar at the London Synbio Network meeting, University College London.

Jiorgos was an invited keynote speaker at the COINS – International Conference of Life Sciences in Vilnius, Lithuania (17–20 March 2025), presenting work on Pikobodies and bioengineering NLR immune receptor-nanobody fusions.

Roxanne Sicat presented her MRes work at the annual SchoBozKa meeting on 20 February 2025. SchoBozKa is the joint annual retreat of six plant immunity research groups: Sebastian Schornack (Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University, SLCU), Tolga Bozkurt (Imperial College London), Sophien Kamoun (The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich), Lida Derevnina (Crop Science Centre, Cambridge University), Philip Carella (John Innes Centre), and Jiorgos Kourelis (Imperial College London).

Jiorgos was awarded the Rank Prize New Lecturer Grant. The grant supports early-stage research for newly-appointed UK lecturers.

Jiorgos presented at Synthetic Biology UK 2024, the Biochemical Society’s annual synthetic biology meeting, held in Cambridge, UK. Travel and attendance were supported by a Biochemical Society Early Career Member Bursary.

Roxanne Sicat joined the lab for her MRes Molecular Plant and Microbial Sciences (both rotations) at Imperial College London.

Jiorgos was awarded a British Society for Plant Pathology Small Project Fund 2024 for “Development of a high-throughput screening platform for bioengineered plant immune receptors using tobacco cell cultures”. The project ran 1 October 2024 – 31 August 2025.

Jiorgos delivered an invited talk — “Bioengineering secreted proteases converts divergent Rcr3 orthologs and paralogs into extracellular immune co-receptors” — as part of the Plant Cell Webinar series on Proteolysis, organised by the American Society of Plant Biologists.

Watch the talk on YouTube (jumps to 43:14).

Jiorgos gave a talk at the XX International Plant Protection Congress (IPC) in Athens, Greece, and co-chaired the session “NLR-guided strategies for durable disease resistance in crop plants” with Lida Derevnina (University of Cambridge). The congress ran 1–5 July 2024 at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre.

Jiorgos gave an invited seminar — “Pikobodies: what does it take to bioengineer NLR immune receptor-nanobody fusions” — at the Max-Planck-Institut für Molekulare Pflanzenphysiologie in Golm, Germany.

Charlotte Drastich-Yang joined the lab for her MRes Molecular Plant and Microbial Sciences at Imperial College London.

Jiorgos was awarded an Imperial–BBSRC International Partnership Fund seed grant (BB/Y514201/1) running 1 February 2024 – 30 June 2024.

The Kourelis Lab opened at the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London. Jiorgos joined as Assistant Professor in Plant Sciences and Food Security, after five years at The Sainsbury Laboratory (Norwich) and four years at the University of Oxford.