Lab Personnel

Bloom, Alex	Administrative Assistant for the lab.
Casati, Paula	I am analyzing an important environmental factor — UV-B — using maize cDNA microarrays and proteomics. For some candidate genes important in UV-B acclimation I'm determining whether RNAi knockdown mutants affect UV-B responses. I am now an Associate Professor at the Center of Photosynthesis and Biochemical Studies, University of Rosario, Argentina
Egger, Rachel	I am a graduate student interested in studying anther cellular development and cell fate specification.
Fernandes, John	I am the lab bioinformatics specialist and help analyze data and maintain the lab databases and records.  I do DNA sequence quality checking, perform BLAST searches and work on the annotation of our candidate genes from microarray experiments.
Kelliher, Tim	I am a graduate student researching anther cell division pattern and control using confocal microscopy of propidium iodide and EdU labeled nuclei. Wild-type maize development is being compared to mutants such as mac1 and others with defect in cell fate setting or maintenance to pinpoint the timing and mechanisms responsible for the sequential production of cell types.
Kraszewska, Dominika	Lab assistant for the Walbot and Yanofsky labs.
Morrow, Darren	I generated sequence data from both EST and RescueMu transposon libraries & explore gene expression during germinal cell definition in maize. The latter project means I'm performing most of the microarray hybridizations for our analysis of anther developmentas well as prepping lines for the cytological screens at UC-Berkeley.
Nan, Gillian	I joined the lab to participate in the maize gene discovery project using a RescueMu transposon tagging strategy.  Now I'm studying the regulation of Mu in the context of the maize life cycle.
Pimentel, Sam	Undergraduate working with John Fernandes.
Vonitter, Ray	Greenhouse Assistant, working at Plant Growth Facilities.
Walbot, Virginia Principal Investigator	My central interest is the mechanisms that create allelic diversity and modulate genome stability in plants.  We are currently trying to define how a "germinal" cell is specified-- that is cells whose descendants enter meiosis -- because Mu elements change their transposition biochemistry in germinal compared to somatic cells and genome changes are heritable only in the germinal cells.
Wang, Dongxue	My projects include detailed analysis of the ms8 mutant's effect on maize anther ontogeny.
Wilson, Dave	As the Plant Growth Facilities manager, I oversee the field conditions.

Alumni Personnel News

• Chas Andre, former graduate student, did postdocs at DuPont and in Berlin, then had a series of biotech jobs in the Bay Area (Applied Biosystems, MJ Research, and others) before moving to Finland with Finnzymes. He's currently looking for a new job in the bay area (as of March 2010).
• Mark Alfenito, former postdoc, founded a series of biotech companies, the newest being Engen, Inc. in the bay area (as of March 2010).
• Maria-Ines Benito, former graduate student, is currently "retired" from science. Her husband Jonathan Eisen, former lab collaborator, is now a Professor at UC-Davis.
• Pat Bedinger, former postdoc, is a professor at Colorado State University, and she works on tomato evolution and breeding systems.
• John Bodeau is exploring SNPs in the human genome at Applied Biosystems.
• Jeff Bennetzen, former post doc, is a Professor at the University of Georgia and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
• Judy Callis is now a professor at UC Davis.
• Paula Casati, former postdoc and current collaborator, is an associate professor in Rosario, Argentina. She studies UV-B regulation of gene expression and chromatin remodeling during irradiation.
• Vicki Chandler, former postdoc, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, spring 2002, directed BIO5 at the University of Arizona, and is now the chief science office of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Menlo Park CA.
• Diane Chermak, former technician while she was attending San Jose State Univeristy, is lab manage working with Wolf Frommer at the Carnegie Institution, Dept. Plant Biology, on campus.
• Yangrae Cho, former postdoc, is now an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii studying plant-fungal pathogen interaction. Aloha.
• Dave Duncan, former undergraduate honors student, worked for Pioneer in Redwood City after graduation in 2006, then received a masters degree from the University of Wisconsin, and is now a Ph.D. candidate in sustainable agriculture there.
• Matt Fitzgerald, former postdoc, has been teaching at local colleges since 2004.
• Mike Fromm, former postdoc, is the new director of the biotechnology center at the University of Nebraska.
• Dean Goodman, former graduate student, is now a postdoc and lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, working on the plant-derived genes in the malarial genome.
• Matthias Hahn, former postdoc, is a professor of plant pathology in Germany. Collaborator Gunther Doehlemann was one of his Ph.D. students.
• Sarah Hake, former graduate student, is now Director of the Plant Gene Expression Center, Albany CA, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.
• David Hoisington, former graduate student, worked as director of molecular breeding at CIMMYT for many years and has now switched to managing this program area in India (and Africa) in Hyderabad.
• Patricia Leon, former masters student, is now a professor at UNAM-Cuernavaca, and we have collaborated on microarray experiments to study sugar regulation.
• Soo-Hwan Kim is now an assistant professor at Yonsei University in Korea.
• Avi Levy, former postdoc, is an associate professor at the Weizmann Institute; he's still interested in genome stability, recombination, and developing tools to study the dynamic plant genome.
• Jiong Ma is now living in New Jersey and working at Rutgers and pursuing biotechnology opportunities.
• Mike Mulligan, former postdoc, is a professor at UC-Irvine and has held several administrative posts as well.
• Lukas Mueller is now a staff member of the Boyce Thompson Institute on the Cornell University campus. He manages the solanaceae database.
• Brian Nakao, a former Maize Gene Discovery Project sequencing technician who produced most of our ESTs is now working at a start-up biotech company.
• Akemi Ono, a former life science research assistant, studied the role of MURB, the helper protein of the Mu transposon system and is now doing research at the National Institute of Basic Biology in Aichi, Japan.
• Claudio Pairoba,a former postdoc, is back in Rosario, Argentina, running a radio science show, working as a pharmacist and generally living life to the fullest.
• Wensheng Qin,a former postdoc, transferred to the Carnegie Institution on campus to finish his training with Chris Somerville. He is now an assistant professor in Thunder Bay, Canada.
• Manish Raizada is an associate professor at the Univeristy of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
• Carol Rivin, former postdoc, is an associate professor at Oregon State University.
• George Rudenko is working as a senior research scientist at Solazyme, a start-up company working on biofuel from algal processing of materials.
• Khaled Sarsour, former DNA sequencing technician, graduated with a Ph.D. from the UC-Berkeley in the School of Public Health.
• Bret Schneider, former Maize Gene Discovery Project sequencing technician who produced most of our genomic sequence flanking RescueMu insertion sites, is now a mechanical engineer at Ascendant Engineering Solutions .
• Sejal Shah, former honors student, has a series of interesting and challenging jobs in start-up biotech and established bio-tech companies. Early in 2010 she had a baby girl and is taking a short sabbatical from working so hard. Her husband is a senior manager at Google.
• Dave Skibbe, former postdoc, is a trait scientist at Syngenta.
• Macky Smith, former graduate student, attended medical school after his Ph.D. training at Washington University. He now manages pediatric clinical trials at the National Cancer Institute.
• Ann Stapleton, former postdoc, is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and is a coPI on the iPLANT project.
• Rebecca Taylor, former technician and masters student, is currently an IP consultant at PharmacoFore.
• Lily Yu, former postdoc, did a second postdoc at the University of Michigan and expects to find employment in bioinformatics in China.