Why should we study plants? Paula Duque, lead researcher for the “Molecular Biology of Plants” group at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science, recalls how studying the green world is as important as researching human diseases. Better understanding plants not only returns deeper knowledge about life in general but also generates means of combating hunger and malnutrition, preventing and curing diseases, preserving the environment, generating new sources of energy and even ensuring we go about our lives better dressed and happier.

Paula Duque graduated in Vegetal Biology from the Faculty of Science, the University of Lisbon in 1993 before completing her doctoral degree in Physiology and Biochemistry at the same university having carried out part of her thesis in New Zealand. In 1999, she moved to New York where she worked at the Rockefeller University. She returned to Portugal in 2006 in order to launch her laboratory at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science where she currently studies the ways in which plants perceive environmental stress and the strategies they deploy to respond to this stress at the molecular level.