Guido is from Germany, studied and received his PhD at the University of Regensburg and spent his postdoc time at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, USA. He started his own group at the Center for Organismal Studies, University of Heidelberg and is full professor at HHU since 2020. Guido is particularly interested in the "social networks" inside cells, in the soil rhizosphere and certainly also among humans.

I support the entire institute with organizational matters, purchasing equipment, managing the accounts and being the contact person for all employees. I also work for a professorship in German studies.

Marjorie comes from France. She graduated and did her Ph.D. at Université Paris-Saclay, on the campus of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of Gif-sur-Yvette. She joined the Grossmann lab in 2019. She is interested in discovering novel interacting partners of the Rho GTPase ROP2, using the recent technology of biotin ligase-based proximity labeling. She is also fond of image analysis automation, and the development of tools facilitating every day’s lab work.

Christian is from Germany, has studied Biology at the University of Bonn, graduated in pharmaceutical biology and since 2020 is a PhD candidate in the CEPLAS gradschool for plant science. Christian is investigating how plant roots acclimate to changing environmental conditions while interacting with soil bacteria by utilising soil-on-a chip approaches based on microfluidics and 3D printing.

Mengqi is from China and has a background in soil and plant sciences. She completed her PhD at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), where she studied how soil structure shapes ecological processes using X-ray computed tomography. Since 2026, she is a postdoctoral researcher in CEPLAS at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, focusing on soil-inspired microfluidics and root–microbe interactions.