Charles Underwood

Charles Underwood, Professor of Plant Genome Engineering at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is a geneticist recognized for his work on the reproduction of plant species. He is particularly known for his studies on plant genomics, meiotic recombination, clonal seed production by apomixis and the development of novel hybrid breeding schemes, including polyploid genome design.Charles was born in Lancashire in the United Kingdom where he grew up. He read molecular and cellular biochemistry at St Anne’s College at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD from the School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. During his PhD Charles was co-supervised by Prof. Robert Martienssen and Prof. Ian Henderson and identified factors that modulate the distribution and absolute number of meiotic crossover events in plant genomes. From 2016 until 2019 Underwood worked as a Postdoc at KeyGene, a plant research company based in Wageningen, the Netherlands, where he unravelled the genetic basis of parthenogenesis (“virgin birth”) during clonal seed production in apomictic dandelions. Since September 2019, Charles has led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany. Charles’s team currently focuses on reproduction in crop species and have established tomato as a powerful model system to explore how different elements of plant reproduction, including meiosis and fertilization, have been molded and adapted over evolutionary time. During his career, Charles has been awarded several grants, including a Veni grant (2019) from the Dutch Research Council, and a Starting grant (2022) from the European Research Council.