Alain Goossens obtained his Master in Biology-Plant Biotechnology at Ghent University (1992) and his PhD in Marc Van Montagu’s lab at the Laboratory of Genetics, Ghent University (1998), studying plant seed storage protein synthesis. During his PhD, he has also been a visiting researcher at CIAT in Cali (Colombia) in the group of César Cardona. After obtaining his PhD degree, he performed postdoctoral studies for 2 years at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) in the lab of Ramón Serrano, supported by a TMR-Marie Curie EU postdoctoral fellowship, and working on yeast salt tolerance. He returned to VIB-Ghent University and started his own research group within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology at Ghent University in 2003, focusing on jasmonate signaling, gene discovery in plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. He is experienced in yeast and plant functional genomics, molecular biology and applied biotechnology. His current research aspires to understand jasmonate signaling in model, crop and medicinal plants and unravel the mechanisms that steer plant metabolism in fitness programs to find novel tools for plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology Besides as group leader at VIB, Alain Goossens has been appointed as a part-time (10%) Associate Professor in 2010, subsequently as a part-time (10%) Full Professor in 2014, and recently as a full-time Full Professor in 2022, all at Ghent University. He is teaching ‘Metabolic Engineering’. He has been mentoring over 40 master students, 30 PhD students and 20 postdoctoral researchers. He has authored over 150 peer reviewed ‘A1’ publications, including in Nature, Science, Nature Communications, PNAS, etc., which have been cited over 10,000 times (H-index 55). In 2020 he was elected as an EMBO fellow and since 2015 he has been continuously included in the Thomson Reuters list of Highly Cited Researchers.