Postdoctoral researcher at the Earth and Life Institute (UCLouvain)
I m a Postdoctoral researcher at ELI (UCLouvain - BE).
In October 2025, I secured a founding to start the HydroNeedle project (CR-FNRS) with Valentin Couvreur, where I'm investigating the interplay between hydraulics and biomechanics in pine needles. This work is carried out in collaboration with Stan Schymanski and Pierre Vollenweider through the Micro-C flux project. Our goal is to better understand how needle-scale hydraulic regulation impacts tissue biomechanics and overall water use strategies in conifers.
Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Umeå Plant Science Centre, working jointly with Stéphanie Robert and Stéphane Verger. My project focused on understanding the relationship between epidermal cells and their superstructures under various mechanical stress conditions, combining imaging, modeling, and quantitative analysis.
From 2018 to 2022, I completed my PhD at UCLouvain (Belgium), where I delved into the fascinating "in silico" realm of root hydraulic anatomy under Guillaume guidance. Following that, I carried out two short post-doc at UCLouvain, which led me to explore further the hidden half.
Anatomical functions are quite surprising and to unravel their mysteries I mostly use computational models. As a results, I hope that a better understanding at the anatomical level will improve the ways we grow plants.
Overview of the few project I have been working on.
Modeling hydraulic functions of pine needle anatomy under well-watered and water deficit conditions.
Adrien Heymans, Stan Schymanski, Pierre Vollenweider, Valentin Couvreur
High-throughput apical hook phenotyping of dark-grown Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings.
David Radianu, Adrien Heymans, Siamsa Doyle, Stéphanie Robert, Sara Raggi
Outer epidermal edges mediate cell-cell adhesion for tissue integrity in plants.
Özer Erguvan, Adrien Heymans, Asal Atakhani, Elsa Gascon, Richard S. Smith, Olivier Ali, Stéphane Verger
The influence of heterogeneous soil water potential on root growth, modeling root plastic response
A. Heymans, T. Wei, M. Laurent, X. Draye and M. Javaux.
Combining cross-section images and modeling tools to create high-resolution root system hydraulic atlases in Zea mays
A. Heymans, V. Couvreur, and G. Lobet.
Radial water fluxes in a generated root cross section
A. Heymans, and V. Couvreur
Virtual phenotyping pipeline for root hydraulic traits.
A. Heymans, V. Couvreur, F. Meunier, M. Javaux, X. Draye, and G. Lobet.
Generator of root anatomy in R.
A. Heymans, V. Couvreur, T. LaRue, A. Paez-Garcia, G. Lobet.
MARSHAL, a novel tool for virtual phenotyping of maize root system hydraulic architectures
F. Meunier, A. Heymans, X. Draye, V. Couvreur, M. Javaux, and G. Lobet
From root system scans to a 3D models of your plant in few steps.
Plant models - Image analysis software tools - Image dataset
quantitative-plant.org . A website presenting image analysis software tools and models for plants
Doing Sciences with R
R for Data Science. This book will teach you how to do data science with R
Data to Viz. From Data to Viz leads you to the most appropriate graph for your data. It links to the code to build it and lists common caveats you should avoid.