The Doctoral Network HeatDDR officially started on March 1st, 2025. It brings together 17 partners to train 9 doctoral candidates in Plant Sciences. This initiative is funded by the Horizon Europe program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), Grant Agreement No. 101169110, with a total budget of €2.2 million. The project, that will run for 4 years, is coordinated by the Paris-Saclay University (Paris, France). The scientific coordinator is Dr. Cécile Raynaud, Research Director at the Institute of Plant Sciences of Paris-Saclay (IPS2).
Understanding plant resilience to climate change
The project focuses on one of the key challenges in modern agriculture: ensuring crop productivity and food security in the context of global climate change. Projections suggest that northern Europe will experience longer, warmer, and more humid summers, while southern Europe will increasingly face heat and drought stress. Such environmental conditions can severely inhibit plant growth, directly affecting crop yield.
HeatDDR aims at understanding how heat stress impacts plant development, with a particular emphasis on the DNA Damage Response (DDR), a mechanism that plays a dual role, contributing to thermotolerance while limiting plant growth. The ultimate goal is to decipher DDR at the molecular level, to finally be able to ensure yield stability without compromising the physiological processes essential for stress tolerance. By tackling this issue, the project aims to make a lasting impact on the resilience of European agriculture.
A collaborative European training network
Coordinated by Université Paris-Saclay, the HeatDDR consortium brings together 17 partners from across Europe (10 countries), including both academic institutions and private companies. Each partner contributes its expertise in Plant Sciences to offer a comprehensive, interdisciplinary training program for 9 PhD students from 6 countries worldwide.
The project’s ambition is to train a new generation of scientists with a deep understanding of plant stress responses and strong transferable skills. Thanks to collaborations and secondments, each doctoral candidate will benefit from supervision by multiple partners, training in advanced techniques, and the development of soft skills essential for the development of their career.
Future events
The kick-off meeting of the HeatDDR network will take place on December 2–3, 2025, at iFZ in Giessen (Germany). This event will bring together the newly recruited doctoral candidates and all consortium members to officially launch the project’s collaborative research and training program.
Over the following four years, the consortium will organize four additional workshops, combining scientific sessions with technical and soft-skills training designed to strengthen the fellows’ expertise and support their career development. In 2029, a final three-day symposium will be hosted by Université Paris-Saclay, where the doctoral candidates will present their research outcomes alongside invited external speakers.
For more information, contact:
Cécile Raynaud, Coordinator
Alberto Ballin, Project Manager
HeatDDR is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.