About: Researchers
Posted on Dec 6, 2007 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
GLBRC Leadership
GLBRC Principal Investigator, Director
Professor of Bacteriology, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Bioconversion
The principal investigator of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, 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.
GLBRC Scientific Director
Professor of Plant Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Improved Plant Biomass
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. As a result, he knows many GLBRC participants from both campuses.
Professor of Biochemistry, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Improved Plant Biomass, Education and Outreach
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.
Informatics and Information Technology Director
Focus Area: Informatics and Information Technology
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. Benton is Director of the GLBRC Informatics and Information Technology group. This 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.
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Biomass Processing
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. As associate director of the Office of Biobased Technologies, 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.
Professor of Bacteriology, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Bioconversion
Landick’s research focuses on RNA polymerase, the central enzyme of gene expression in all free-living organisms. His goal is to understand how RNA polymerase is regulated during transcription, which may lead to the identification of novel RNA polymerase inhibitors that can be employed in synthetic microbiology.
John Ralph
Professor of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Focus Area: Improved Plant Biomass
A Professor of Biochemistry at UW-Madison, 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. This year, Ralph was appointed Professor in the Department of Biochemistry 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.
GLBRC Director of Enabling Technologies
Richmond is an expert in transcriptomics and microarray platform use, with considerable experience managing multidisciplinary projects and workflows. Her role is to facilitate and coordinate use of GLBRC technology resources (sample processing pipelines, microarray, metabolomic, proteomic, flux balance, enzymatic and cell wall profiling facilities). In addition, she has significant involvement with LIMS, bioinformatics, resource databases and scientific operations throughout the center.
Professor of Crop and Soil Sciences, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Development of a Sustainable Bioenergy Economy
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.
GLBRC Scientific Programs Manager
Slater is a plant bacterial geneticist and 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.
Project Leaders:
