Welcome to YRSPP 2026!

We are excited to invite you to Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city from 15-18 April 2026 for the fourth edition of YRSPP.

The Young Researchers' Symposium on Plant Photobiology is designed to showcase the work of early-career researchers (ECRs) studying plant photobiology. If this sounds like you, we'd love to see you there!

YRSPP comes at a crucial juncture in the advancement of plant science research, as numerous global challenges highlight the need to harness the potential of plants. There will be six great keynote speakers in attendance, prizes to celebrate the best ECR presentations/posters, and organised social activities to promote networking and knowledge exchange leading to international cross-disciplinary collaboration and innovation. Learn more

Previously we've featured talks on the perception and transduction of light and circadian signals; their integration with other signalling pathways like stress, nutrient signals and temperature to modulate growth; engineering synthetic phototransduction pathways; agricultural applications, and more. Scroll down to see our keynote speakers for 2026!

Registration is now open!

Click here for more information about the registration process, or click the green button below to go to the University of Edinburgh's ePay website to register right now.

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2026 Keynote speakers

We have an exciting lineup of early-career and established keynote speakers this year - read on to learn more!

Professor Kerry Franklin

Professor of Plant Signalling, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Kerry's lab studies how plants integrate light and temperature information to control growth and development. The regulation of stem elongation by light quality and temperature signalling has been a longstanding research focus of her work. More recently, her group has been applying knowledge gained in this area to investigate the impact of plant photoreceptor signalling on herbicide efficacy and leaf senescence.

Professor Ute Hoecker

Professor, Institute for Plant Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany

Ute's group uses Arabidopsis and the moss Physcomitrium patens to understand the role of protein ubiquitination in phytochrome and cryptochrome signalling. Her research focuses particularly on the COP1/SPA ubiquitin ligase and its transcription factor targets, such as PAP, HY5 and TCP. More recently, her group has also begun exploring the ecological relevance of signalling pathways when Arabidopsis is subjected to crowding by neighbouring plants.

Dr. Anne-Sophie Fiorucci

Assistant Professor, Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC), Université Paris-Saclay, France

Anne-Sophie studied the regulation of gene induction by light in plants via chromatin mechanisms during her PhD (Paris, France). She then went to Lausanne (Switzerland) for her post-doc where she developed her interest for plant responses to light and temperature in several physiological contexts. She is now Assistant Professor at Université Paris-Saclay (France), where she studies the interaction between phytochrome-dependent growth responses and nitrogen nutrition.

Dr. Charlotte (Lot) Gommers

Assistant Professor, Laboratory of Plant Physiology, Wageningen University, Netherlands

Lot's group investigates how chloroplasts contribute to the perception of and adaptation to changing environments by acting as environmental sensors and generating retrograde signals to adjust nuclear gene expression, and how this helps plants modulate their development to tolerate abiotic stresses. Lot has previously studied how plants respond to changes in light quality during shading by neighbouring plants, and how chloroplast retrograde signals antagonise photoreceptor-mediated plant development.

Dr. Jordi Moreno-Romero

Ramón y Cajal Researcher, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain

Jordi is a plant molecular biologist focused on plant epigenetics. For his PhD he studied the roles of the ubiquitous protein kinase CK2 in plants. He then went on to study genomic imprinting and later explored how epigenetic mechanisms modulate plant responses to shade. His current research centers on Polycomb-group proteins that regulate light responses and other environmental cues, with the ultimate goal of developing tools for crop improvement through chromatin remodelling.

Dr. Uriel Urquiza-García

Group Leader, Institute of Synthetic Biology, Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS), Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany

Uriel's work focuses on how plants perceive and integrate signals from light, temperature, and circadian time. During his PhD studies, he employed experimental and computational methods to quantitatively analyse the plant circadian clock. He then began using synthetic biology to investigate the complex molecular networks integrating the perception of light, temperature, and time signals in plants. This includes using plant optogenetics and synthetic genomics to improve plant performance by understanding plant signalling networks.

YRSPP 2026 is made possible by:

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