Thomas Kroj studied chemistry at the University of Cologne (Germany) and obtained his PhD for work on plant immune signalling in 1999 from the University of Halle (Germany). After a post-doc dealing with the transcriptional regulation of seed maturation at the “Institut des Sciences du Végétal” (Gif-sur-Yvette, France), he became in 2001 researcher at INRAE in the Laboratory of Plant-Microbe Interactions (Toulouse) to investigate immunity to pathogenic bacteria in Arabidopsis thaliana. In 2007, he moved to Montpellier where is a group leader at the Plant Health Institute Montpellier and studies virulence mechanisms in the blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae and immunity in rice.