Plant pathologists need interdisciplinary expertizes for life-long employability

There is an increasing demand for arable and vegetable crops to feed the increasing world population. High yielding crops and vegetables are prone to new disease outbreaks as breeding for both high yield and disease resistance is often not compatible because there is a fitness cost to disease resistance. There might be physical, physiological, biochemical or metabolic trade-offs of successful defense against pathogens. Especially protection against post-harvest and soil-borne diseases is particularly difficult to achieve not only by chemical treatment but also by disease resistance breeding and biocontrol agents. New disease outbreaks require joint actions by multidisciplinary trained plant pathologists to come up with sustainable solutions. MSc and PhD students need to be trained in all facets of biology with not only expertise in classical plant pathology, but also in diagnostics, genetics, plant breeding, molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics. Multidisciplinary trained MSc and PhD students are required in academia governmental jobs and private industry to prevent or cope with new disease outbreaks. In Msc and PhD education we need to teach all these expertizes. I will give an overview of the jobs that were taken by MSc and PhD students who were trained in different aspects of plant pathology during the last two decades at Wageningen University and affiliated academic institutions.