Invited Speakers

Dr. Arthur Grossman

Staff Scientist, the Carnegie Institution, Stanford University

Arthur Robert Grossman (born 1950): Arthur Grossman has been a Staff Scientist at The Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology (now Biosphere Science and Engineering) since 1982, and holds a courtesy appointment as Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. He has performed research across fields ranging from plant biology, microbiology, marine biology, ecology, genomics, engineering and photosynthesis and initiated large scale algal genomics by leading the Chlamydomonas genome project (sequencing the genome coupled to transcriptomics). During his tenure at Carnegie, he mentored more than fifteen PhD students and approximately 50 post-doctoral fellows (many of whom have become very successful independent scientists at both major universities and in industry). In 2002 he received the Darbaker Prize (Botanical Society of America) for work on microalgae and in 2009 received the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal (National Academy of Sciences) for the quality of his publications on marine and freshwater algae. In 2015 he was Vice Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Photosynthesis and in 2017 was Chair of that same conference (Photosynthetic plasticity: From the environment to synthetic systems). He gave the Arnon endowed lecture on photosynthesis in Berkeley in March of 2017, has given numerous plenary lectures and received various fellowships throughout his career, including the Visiting Scientist Fellowship – Department of Life and Environmental Sciences (DiSVA), Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) (Italy, 2014), the Lady Davis Fellowship (Israel, 2011) and the Chaire Edmond de Rothschild (IBPC in Paris in 2017-2018). He was Co-Editor in Chief of Journal of Phycology for over 10 years and served on the editorial boards of many well-respected biological journals including the Annual Review of Genetics, Plant Physiology, Eukaryotic Cell, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Molecular Plant, and Current Genetics. He has also reviewed innumerable papers and grants, served on many scientific panels that has evaluated various programs for granting agencies [NSF, CNRS, Marden program (New Zealand)] and private companies. He has also been active on scientific advisory boards for both nonprofit and for-profit companies including Phoenix Bioinformatics, Excelixis, Martex, Solazyme/TerraVia, Checkerspot, Phycoil and, most recently, CarbonDrop.

Dr. Ronan O’Malley

Group Lead of Sequencing Technologies at Joint Genome Institute, University of Chicago

Dr. O’Malley joined the JGI in 2016 to lead the Sequencing Technologies group. In this role he manages production sequencing for community sequencing projects, and leads R&D efforts to expand the functional genomics and epigenomics capabilities of the JGI. Dr. O’Malley interest is in developing new functional genomics technologies for applications to outstanding problems in environmental and agricultural biology. His accomplishments include creating the first integrative next-generation sequencing maps of methylomes and transcriptomes in any species (Arabidopsis), and inventing DAP-seq, a rapid and low-cost annotation of most transcription factor binding sites in an organism. Dr. O’Malley brings his expertise to the JGI to provide cutting-edge research products to the user community to understand the epigenetic and gene regulatory sequence codes in plants, microbes and fungi.

Dr. Christine Queitsch

Professor, University of Washington

Dr. Christine Queitsch grew up in the former East Germany where gardening and foraging were common to ensure food supplies. She has always loved growing plants. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study plant thermotolerance and chaperone function in evolution with Sue Lindquist at the University of Chicago. After receiving my PhD in Chicago, she started my own group as a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University, and learned a lot about genomics and computational biology. As a faculty member at UW Genome Sciences since 2007, she has adapted several technologies first developed in animal genomics to plants in order to understand and ultimately manipulate plant gene regulation. She still gardens and forages and one of her three sons has inherited her love for rummaging around in the garden and talking to our plants.

Dr. Venkatesan Sundaresan

Professor, University of California, Davis

Dr. Sundaresan initially majored in Physics in India, then did his Ph.D. in Biophysics on bacterial nitrogen fixation with Dr. Fred Ausubel at Harvard University. After postdoctoral research in maize genetics with Dr. Mike Freeling at UC Berkeley, he took a faculty position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York.  He subsequently served as the founding Director of the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology (now Temasek Life Sciences Laboratories) at the National University of Singapore, then moved to UC Davis where he is currently a faculty member.  His major research interest has been plant reproduction, with a focus on formation of gametes and zygotes; a secondary research interest has been understanding plant-microbiome interactions. Using a rice model, his lab identified transcription factors that drive the zygotic transition.  Manipulation of the corresponding genes results in parthenogenesis, and when combined with editing of meiosis genes, rice plants that reproduce as genetic clones were generated.  Hybrid rice with these gene alterations has been successfully propagated stably through seeds.  This technology, called synthetic apomixis, can make high-yielding hybrid seeds accessible to subsistence farmers, and help meet global food demands sustainably through higher crop yields under limitations of agricultural inputs and land usage.

Dr. Liz Freeman Rosenzweig

Associate, Morrison Foerster

Dr. Liz Freeman Rosenzweig focuses her practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property and regulatory counseling in the areas of life sciences and agricultural biotechnology, including AgTech; algae; environmental incentives such as carbon credits; crop science; gene editing; genetics; GM/GE plants; molecular biology; plant breeders’ rights/plant variety protection; plant breeding; plant IP; and soil technologies. Prior to joining the firm as an associate, Dr. Freeman Rosenzweig was a summer associate, a law clerk, and a scientific analyst intern at Morrison & Foerster, where she drafted office action responses for foreign and domestic patent applications, amended claims, drafted domestic utility and plant patent applications, and analyzed freedom to operate agreements.

Post-doc / Grad student speakers:

Dr.Geoffrey Vrla

Postdoctoral Fellow, Staskawicz Lab, UC Berkeley

Geoff earned his B.A. in Chemistry at Middlebury College in 2014. In 2020, he completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where he studied how bacterial attachment to host surfaces stimulates pathogenesis. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Staskawicz lab, utilizing precision genome engineering techniques to improve our understanding of disease resistance in rice and wheat.

Dr. Yang-Tsung Lin

Postdoctoral Fellow, Merchant Lab, UC Berkeley

Dr. Yang-Tsung Lin is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sabeeha Merchant Lab. His research focuses on the development of oleaginous green algae as a sustainable platform to produce valuable lipid feedstock for both food and renewable energy applications

Chandler Sutherland

PhD candidate, Krasileva Lab, UC Berkeley

Chandler Sutherland is a fourth year PhD candidate in Plant Biology with a designated emphasis in Computational and Genomic Biology in the lab of Ksenia Krasileva. Her research focus is on the contribution of mutation to the evolution of plant immune receptors with the goal of assisting in the design and successful implementation of synthetic immune receptors. She uses a combination of genomic and biochemical tools to investigate the rate and mechanisms of mutation in model and crop plants. She received her bachelor’s degree in Molecular Environmental Biology with a minor in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2020.

Dr. Noam Prywes

Postdoctoral Fellow, Savage Lab, UC Berkeley

Noam is a postdoctoral fellow and who works jointly with the lab of Brian Staskwicz. He is studying rubisco biochemistry and chloroplast transformation technology.