Guest Speakers

Dr. Wen Chen is a Research Scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Ottawa Research and Development Centre. Her research integrates microbial ecology, genomics, and metagenomics to advance microbiome driven discovery in modern plant pathology. She investigates pathobiomes under biotic and abiotic stress, pathogen dispersal across air, water, and soil interfaces, and microbiome mediated disease suppression. Her work supports high resolution surveillance, risk modeling, and microbiome informed biocontrol strategies to strengthen climate resilient agricultural systems. On a broader scale, she studies how agricultural systems reshape environmental microbiomes and antimicrobial resistance across watershed ecosystems within a One Health framework. Dr. Chen holds an adjunct professorship at the University of Ottawa, serves as Senior Editor for the Canadian Journal of Plant Pathology, and previously served as Senior Director of the Canadian Phytopathological Society.

Dr. Peter Moffett is a Professor at Department of Biology University of Sherbrooke. His group studies the plant immune system, with the long-term goal of applying this knowledge to the generation of disease‑resistant plants. Dr. Moffett’s research uses several model plants to study interactions between plants and pathogens, including viruses and bacteria. This includes the investigation of how plants recognize pathogens, the signaling molecules involved in disease resistance and ultimately, how plants eliminate pathogens. His group also studies how bacterial pathogens manipulate plant metabolism to create an environment conducive to their growth, and how plants actively counteract these strategies. Many bacterial pathogens deploy type III secretion system (T3SS) effector proteins that reprogram host processes to enrich the apoplast with water and nutrients, thereby establishing an extracellular niche favorable for bacterial proliferation. At the same time, plants mount defense responses that modify apoplastic conditions, such as restricting water accumulation and limiting nutrient availability, suppressing pathogen growth. His group investigates how effectors reshape the plant–pathogen interface and how plants fight back to maintain control of their extracellular environment.

Dr. Hailing Jin is the Cy Mouradick Chair Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Plant Pathology at the University of California, Riverside, USA. Her research focuses on RNA biology, epigenetic regulation, and antimicrobial peptides in plant–microbe interactions, with the goal of developing innovative, environmentally sustainable strategies for controlling fungal and bacterial diseases in crops. Dr. Jin’s laboratory discovered cross-kingdom RNA communication between plants and their pathogens, as well as between bacteria and fungi, and established the critical role of extracellular vesicles in mediating this process. Her team further demonstrated that many fungal pathogens can efficiently uptake environmental RNAs and vesicles, providing a foundational basis for the development of spray-induced gene silencing technologies for crop protection.

Dr. Jin received her PhD from the Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology & Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and completed postdoctoral training at the John Innes Centre (UK) and the University of California, Berkeley. She has published 118 peer-reviewed articles with 23,551 citations and an H-index of 69. Dr. Jin is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Phytopathological Society, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She has also been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science.