Project Associate
As an evolutionary botanist, Steven Janssens has a broad interest in the ecology, evolution and conservation of plants. Since 2013, Steven Janssens works as senior researcher in Meise Botanic Garden where he focuses on unravelling evolutionary patterns and speciation mechanisms within flowering plants using a subset of different scientific disciplines ranging from biogeography, diversification analyses, population genetics, phylogenetics, species distribution modelling and bioinformatics. Although he works on a broad range of angiosperm lineages, he is mostly interested in bananas (Musaceae), coffee (Rubiaceae) and wild beans (Fabaceae). His research aims to assess fundamental research questions about the origin and evolution of crops and their close relatives in order to provide valuable insights that can be used at the level of applied research such as crop breeding activities or the selection of disease resistant or drought tolerant species.