Chair of Life Sciences (Class C)
Biography
Eva Kondorosi was born in Budapest, graduated (Biology) and received her PhD (Genetics) at the L. Eötvös University in Budapest. She was postdoc at the Max Planck Institute (Köln) and visiting scholar at the Sussex, Harvard, and Cornell Universities. She was a research director at the CNRS Institut des Science Végétales, then director of the BAYGEN Institute in Hungary. Currently she directs the Symbiosis and Functional Genomics Unit at the Biological Research Centre in Szeged.
Her primary research field is Rhizobium-legume symbiosis, symbiotic nitrogen fixation with recent focus on plant-controlled differentiation of bacteria. Her current work led to the production of several highly potent antimicrobial peptides of plant origin, which are powerful novel antimicrobial drugs to be used in medicine and agriculture. Her expertise is very broad in the fields of microbiology, plant development biology, cell cycle control, bacterial and host communication, molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, and omics.
For her original discoveries she received several prestigious awards including the Balzan Prize, the Prima Primissima and Széchenyi Prizes. She is full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and member of Academia Europaea (Chair of Life Sciences, Board of Trustees), the European Molecular Biology Organization, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the French Academy of Agriculture and the European Academy of Microbiology. She was member of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors of the European Commission (2020-2024), ERC Scientific Council (2013-2018), Vice President of the European Research Council and Life Science domain coordinator (2017-2018) and was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Scientific Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of the International Society for Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions (until 2016).