Brian Staskawicz Elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society

Brian Staskawicz, IGI Scientific Director of Agriculture and Professor at UC Berkeley, is a newly elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society, the oldest national scientific institution in the world.

Staskawicz has made seminal contributions to the understanding of infection strategies of plant pathogens and defense mechanisms of plants. These include the cloning the first pathogen effector gene and cloning and characterizing one of the first plant NLRs (Nod-like receptors). Staskawicz and his colleagues also played a major role in establishing Arabidopsis as a model system to study the molecular basis of microbial recognition by plants and genetically dissect defense signaling pathways.

He currently leads IGI’s agricultural research program area and runs several IGI projects in his own lab, which include genome editing to improve crop performance, understand plant immunity, and more. Staskawicz is also a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and has been elected as a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

To see the complete list of newly elected Fellows and Foreign Members, read the Royal Society’s press release.