Plant Health 2025 Speakers
Dr. Van Schepler-Luu is the head of the Plant Pathology and Host Plant Resistance Group at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. She leads collaborative research efforts with partners from over 20 countries, focusing on rice diseases that pose significant threats to global food security. Her PathoTracer project involves 23 institutions across 20 countries and focuses on the development and application of high-throughput markers for monitoring bacterial blight and blast. She coordinates the International Rice False Smut Consortium (IRFSC), which brings together 25 institutions from 12 countries to address false smut, an increasingly important disease in rice production systems.
Schepler-Luu’s group conducts research on pathogen population dynamics, the identification of disease-resistance genes, and beneficial microbes that enhance rice immunity to biotic stresses. These efforts contribute to improving integrated disease management strategies in rice production
Before joining IRRI, Van led the rice research team at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, where she focused on genome editing and rice-bacterial blight pathogen interactions. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, where her research concentrated on plant defense mechanisms against fungal pathogens and insect herbivores.