Trang Tran successfully completed his doctoral program fully-funded by VLIR-UOS at Ghent University in 2021, focusing on investigating the modes of action of Streptomyces strains against fungal phytopathogens and mitigating mycotoxin contamination of maize grains through good agricultural practices (GAPs). Subsequently, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at INRAE in France, where his research aimed to unravel the antifungal and antimycotoxin mechanisms of stilbenoids against Fusarium Head Blight, utilizing multi-omics approaches. Trang Tran then held the position of an FWO postdoctoral researcher at UGent and KULeuven. In this role, he was dedicated to exploring fructan metabolizing microbes and developing sweet immunity-mediated synthetic microbial communities (SWEETiCOM). The combination of fructans as prebiotics and SWEETiCOM has the potential to promote plant growth and enhance plant tolerance to both biotic and abiotic stresses. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at VIB-UGent center for Plant Systems Biology. His role is to discover novel bioactive metabolites via exploiting the chemical warfare during tomato-fungi interactions. He aims to establish an innovative plant-based platform to awaken the vast majority of cryptic biosynthesis gene clusters in fungi, thereby discovering and producing previously unknown fungal bioactive metabolites with potent applications for agriculture and human health. Interests: • Microbe-plant interaction • Biostimulant - Priming - Biocontrol • Transcriptomics • Metabolomics • Phenomics