Prof. Alain Goossens obtained his PhD in Marc Van Montagu’s lab at the Laboratory of Genetics, Ghent University (Belgium), after which he performed postdoctoral studies at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) in the lab of Ramón Serrano. He returned to VIB-Ghent University and started his own research group within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology at Ghent University, focusing on jasmonate signaling, gene discovery in plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. 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.