It is my great pleasure to open our first keynote of NPBC 2026.

Professor Cyril Zipfel is one of the most influential figures in plant immunity research today. After studying at universities across France, he completed his PhD at the Friedrich-Miescher Institute in Basel, where he trained with Thomas Boller and first reported the role of the flagellin receptor FLS2 in disease resistance — a finding that essentially launched the field of plant pattern-triggered immunity.

After his post-doc with Jonathan Jones at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, he became a group leader there in 2007 and then Head of The Sainsbury Laboratory from 2014 to 2018, before joining the University of Zürich in 2018, where he holds the Chair of Molecular and Cellular Plant Physiology. He retains a partial Group Leader position at The Sainsbury Laboratory.

His work on receptor kinases — and how plants perceive pathogens, peptides, and damage-associated signals — has transformed our understanding of how plants "see" their environment. He has been recognised with an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship, ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants, and election to EMBO in 2018; he was awarded the Charles Albert Shull Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2015 and the Tsuneko & Reiji Okazaki Award from Nagoya University in 2018.

Today he will share his latest work on stress-regulated secreted signalling peptides and how plants recognise them.

Please join me in welcoming — Cyril Zipfel.

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