Charlotte Kirchhelle
Charlotte Kirchhelle is Chargée de Recherche at the Laboratory for Plant Reproduction and Development in the National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment Research (INRAE) at École normale supérieure (ENS) de Lyon in Lyon, France. After earning her undergraduate and master's degrees in plant genetics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, Charlotte moved to the UK for her PhD at the University of Oxford. Supervised by Dr Ian Moore, her doctoral work uncovered a novel endomembrane trafficking pathway that controls cell edge-based growth in Arabidopsis thaliana. After a short postdoc, she started her own lab at Oxford and subsequently moved to ENS de Lyon in 2021, where her team continues to investigate the role of the cell edge in plant signalling, mechanotransduction and morphogenesis. At the beginning of the year she joined the Journal of Cell Science as an Associate Editor, where she has brought her expertise in mechanobiology and computational modelling for plant model systems as well as a passion for asking fundamental questions about cell and developmental biology.
Charlotte’s career has taken her from Germany to England, and now to France, where she has “recently” started her own lab. As young scientists, we can’t wait to get some insights into how she combines her personal life with becoming a successful PI.
