Plant Science & Physiology

Biography

Jeff Bennetzen received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Washington, did postdoctoral work for one year in a shared project between the Freeling and Walbot laboratories and joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University as an Assistant Professor in 1983, rising to the position of Umbarger Professor in 1999. Since 2003, he has been the Giles Professor of Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. In 2012, he set up a second laboratory at the Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan, China, and he set up a second lab at the Anhui Agricultural University in 2016. Dr. Bennetzen was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005. He was the founder or co-founder of the International Grass Genome Initiative, the Maize Genetics Executive Committee and the McClintock Prize. His laboratory has published more than 200 manuscripts and is best known for its work investigating transposable elements and the very dynamic processes that determine the structure, function and evolution of plant genomes.

Research Interest

Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics