Sophien Kamoun is globally recognized as a leader in the field of eukaryotic effector biology, host–microbe interaction, and eukaryotic genomics and genetics, as evidenced by numerous invitations to write review articles and present keynote/symposium and other invited talks, as well as his appointment as a senior leader at The Sainsbury Laboratory. He also has a well-documented record of leadership and service in the scientific community. He served on the board of the International Society for Plant–Microbe Interactions for more than 10 years and was elected president in 2010 for the 2012–2014 term. From 2009 to 2014, he served as the head of The Sainsbury Laboratory. In these positions, he worked relentlessly to promote scientific excellence and to bridge the gap between basic and applied research through advocacy and concrete actions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 for his “substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science," and he received the Linnean Medal in 2018 for his service to science.
Kamoun has made groundbreaking contributions to molecular plant pathology, publishing more than 220 research and review articles. His work has been cited more than 18,000 times, and he has an h-index of 77. He has been designated a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher for 2014 to 2018. Kamoun pioneered genomics and molecular biology methods to reveal fundamental insights into the biology of plant pathogens. He discovered virulence effector families from pathogenic oomycetes and fungi and showed how they modulate plant immunity. He demonstrated how antagonistic co-evolution with host plants accelerates evolution of effector genes and emergence of new virulent pathogens, and he contributed significantly to the theoretical development of the field through providing influential reviews and commentaries. His achievements have yielded new concepts and knowledge that has directly impacted disease-resistance breeding and management. Kamoun established effector-based screens that enhanced the effectiveness of resistance breeding and pioneered CRISPR-Cas9 applications in plant biology. He has had continuous interactions with the plant biotechnology and plant-breeding industries.
At the 2018 International Congress of Plant Pathology (ICPP) in Boston, where he acted as the chair of the International Advisory Committee, Kamoun gave a compelling keynote talk that captivated an audience that overfilled the venue. He is a regular speaker at major conferences and has given more than 250 invited seminars and lectures at leading institutions and international conferences, including the William Dewar Cooper Lecture at the University of British Columbia, the Whetzel Westcott Dimock Lecture at Cornell University, and keynote presentations at all the major conferences in his field. He also has served on the advisory boards of several institutes and graduate programs—notably, the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, the Center for Applied Plant Sciences at The Ohio State University, the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, the 2Blades Foundation, and BASF. He has organized several international conferences, including the 2013 Keystone Symposium “Plant Immunity: Pathways and Translations" and the 2009 and 2013 New Phytologist Symposia on effector biology.
Beyond these significant scientific accomplishments, Kamoun is strongly committed to teaching and training students and post-doctoral scientists. Although his current position does not carry any formal teaching requirements, he still volunteers for several teaching activities, serving as the postgraduate research director for The Sainsbury Laboratory. He offers workshops on writing scientific papers to students of the Norwich Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership. Since 2015, this workshop has been required for all new students (approximately 50–60 per year). Kamoun also co-organized a summer school at The Sainsbury Laboratory on plant–microbe interactions (sponsored by EMBO) in 2012, 2015, and 2017 and a training school of the European Union COST Action SUSTAIN in pathogenomics in 2017. He speaks regularly at summer schools. Kamoun is dedicated to helping students and post-docs fulfil their potentials to establish independent careers. More than 90% of his lab's alumni have gone on to have successful careers. Despite the relatively moderate size of his group (10–15 members at any time), five previous lab members who currently hold independent research positions have received starting grants from the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) since 2012. Four of his lab members and alumni, including Liliana Cano at the University of Florida, are recognized as 2018 Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers.
Kamoun is well known as a champion of open science, including open data, transparent peer review, and prepublication archiving of papers to promote rapid dissemination of science. He regularly makes his lectures and talks freely available online. During the last 10 or so years, he has served on the editorial boards of progressive open-access journals, including BMC Biology, Genome Biology, and PLoS Biology. He also has supported the preprint movement by serving as an affiliate for bioRxiv, an open-access preprint repository, and he has been described as a “preprint poster child." He also frequently tweets and blogs about preprints and science publishing. He has engaged in training the next generation of scientists about research integrity and helped draft The Sainsbury Laboratory's policy on research integrity. He has delivered a talk entitled “What are world-class science outputs?" at several venues in Europe and the United States.
Kamoun has a track record of communicating his research widely, enhancing the impact of his studies. His work has been covered extensively by national and international media—notably, the BBC, Financial Times, Bloomberg, NBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio. He regularly gives talks to public audiences and grants interviews on topics such as food security and the importance of plant science. He contributes to relevant debates using social media, including Twitter (with more than 10,000 followers) and Scoop.it (with more than 450,000 page views). More recently, he has engaged in discussing the impact of genome editing on plant breeding. He participated in a Science Media Centre press briefing on new crop-breeding technologies.
