GLBRC Leadership

Timothy Donohue
Principal Investigator, Director
Professor of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Focus Area: Conversion
The principal investigator of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), Donohue is an expert in how microbes harness and convert solar energy. His laboratory researches genetic pathways and networks that microbes use to generate biomass or biofuels from sunlight. His work employs genome sequence, microarrays, proteomics and molecular techniques to determine how the energy in sunlight or renewable nutrients is diverted into cell biomass or biofuel formation.

Daniel Lauffer
Chief Operating Officer
Prior to joining the GLBRC, Lauffer was the associate director of the Wisconsin Fast Plants and Bottle Biology Programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and President and CEO of a seed production company in Wisconsin. Over the past 15 years he has worked in both the private and public sectors collaborating with government agencies, scientists, educators, industry partners, and students from around the world. Lauffer maintains the Rapid-Cylcing Brassica Collection, facilitating a worldwide network of scientists utilizing rapid-cycling Brassicas for educational programs. Lauffer is directly responsible for supporting the GLBRC director to meet the Center’s research goals and objectives and serves as the operational liaison to the DOE and GLBRC member institutions. 

Kenneth Keegstra
Scientific Director
Professor of Plant Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Plants
Keegstra is a renowned plant biologist and an expert in plant cell wall biochemistry. He has extensive management and scientific experience, having served for 14 years as director of the DOE-funded Plant Research Laboratory at MSU and as faculty member in the Botany Department at UW-Madison for 15 years. 

Steven Slater
Scientific Programs Manager
Slater is a plant and bacterial geneticist with considerable experience in genomics, metabolic engineering and running multidisciplinary projects in both academia and industry. His primary role in GLBRC is to manage the overall scientific effort to ensure that connections are forged and research is properly targeted.

Richard Amasino
Professor of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Focus Area: Education and Outreach, Plants
Amasino’s research focuses on understanding the genetic controls of plant flowering and how flowering is altered in response to environmental variables such as changes in day length or temperature. He also serves as education and outreach coordinator for the GLBRC, capitalizing on his excellence and innovation in teaching science to students. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Amasino has won numerous national awards for his innovative uses of genetics in the classroom and his involvement of undergraduate students in original research.

David Benton
Informatics and Information Technology Director
David Benton has more than twenty years experience in biological data management and analysis, with particular expertise in the areas of biological databases, information integration and visualization, knowledge management and component architectures. He has held positions at GlaxoSmithKline, the National Human Genome Research Institute, IntelliGenetics and the ARCO Plant Cell Research Institute. The Informatics and Information Technology (IIT) group develops and delivers computational solutions to support the research mission of the GLBRC. IIT operates the GLBRC data center and central laboratory information management system and provides bioinformatics analysis services and consulting.  

David Cavalier
Core Facilities Coordinator
Cavalier took up the title of Core Facilities Coordinator in 2012, having served as a Project Leader of the GLBRC Cell Wall Analytical Facility (CWAF) at MSU since 2011. He is an expert in the  eld of plant cell wall biology, with specialties in developing and employing high throughput and custom analytical strategies to quantify and structurally characterize plant cell wall polysaccharides and lignin. Cavalier’s expertise allows him to direct the Center’s core facilities, including microarrays, proteomics, metabolomics, cell wall facilities, and DNA sequencing at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI).

Bruce Dale
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University
Leader, Deconstruction
Dale is an expert on making ethanol from cellulose, plant stalks, grass, corn cobs and other woody plant parts and has developed a patented process called ammonia fiber expansion (AFEX), which makes the breakdown of cellulose more efficient, thus tackling one of the thornier problems of producing ethanol. Dale describes his role as providing "technical reality," stemming from his 30 years of work in biomass technology, to take such technology from the lab to the marketplace.

Brian Fox
Marvin J. Johnson Professor of Fermentation Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Co-Leader, Deconstruction
Fox's research goals are to define the structure and the reactivity of the active site diiron center, to probe the catalytic contributions of the active site protein residues and to determine the consequences of protein-protein and protein-substrate interactions on the outcomes of enzymic catalysis. More specifically, he is interested in determining the molecular details of catalytic reactions involving Delta 9D and T4MO. These soluble, multicomponent enzymes utilize dioxygen and NADPH to catalyze the oxidation of hydrocarbons.

Eric Hegg
Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University
Co-Leader, Conversion
Hegg's research interests include the biosynthesis and activation of small molecules, including O₂ and H₂. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota. He has multiple publications and awards, including the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2004.

Randall Jackson
Associate Professor of Agronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Co-Leader, Sustainability
Jackson’s program focuses on structure and function of managed, semi-natural and natural grassland ecosystems. Research in Jackson’s grassland ecology lab spans many levels of ecological organization, from grass identification at the DNA level to landscape diversity effects on alternative biofuels cropping systems. Projects include comparing grass species’ C-sequestration ability, ecosystem provisioning and regulating services in C3-C4 grass mixes, C balance of grasslands under various management regimes, renovation and management effects on pasture productivity and quality under rotational grazing, and promoting establishment and persistence of native C4 grasses in grazed pasture.

Robert Landick
Charles Yanofsky Professor of Biochemistry & Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Leader, Conversion
Landick is an expert on structure, function and regulation of RNA polymerase, the central engine of gene expression. His work spans disciplines from single-molecule biochemistry to genome-scale mechanisms of gene regulation, and includes devising the first single-molecule observation of nucleic acid polymerases and elucidating the fundamental mechanism of nucleotide addition by RNA polymerase. Landick leads GLBRC research focused on engineering new microbial strains that consolidate optimal production of enzymes to release sugars from lignocellullose and optimal conversion of the released sugars to biofuels.  

Meredith Luschen
Business Operations Director 
Luschen has four years in research administration experience within the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Dean’s office. She has worked with GLBRC in some capacity since its inception in 2007. Luschen’s primary role in GLBRC is to manage the overall operations department to ensure efficient business processes are followed while also staying compliant with our federal, state and institutional partners.

 John Ralph
Professor of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Leader, Plants
Ralph has experience as a research scientist for the Forest Research Institute in Rotorua, NZ, and the scientific head of the Research Laboratory for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Ralph has been a research chemist with the USDA-ARS U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center in Madison, WI, with joint appointments in the Departments of Forestry, and Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Ralph has been recognized for his work on lignin biosynthesis, including delineation of the pathways of monolignol synthesis, lignin chemistry and lignin reactions.

G. Philip Robertson
Professor of Crop and Soil Sciences, Michigan State University
Leader, Sustainability
A crop and soil scientist and ecosystem ecologist, Robertson focuses much of his research on the role that agriculture plays in greenhouse gas dynamics, and he is internationally known for his expertise in this area. Robertson has been the director of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) at the Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners, Mich., the only site in the national LTER network to focus on agriculture, for almost 20 years.

Federica Brandizzi
Professor, Michigan State University
Co-Leader, Plants
Brandizzi is a professor in the Michigan State University-U.S. Department of Energy (MSU-DOE) Plant Research Laboratory, and brings over 15 years of academic research experience to her role at GLBRC. Prior to coming to Michigan, Brandizzi was an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the Biology Department of the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Brandizzi’s research explores important biological questions on the role of plant cell endomembranes in response to stress and developmental clues.