The Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology's weekly Plant Pathology 250 seminar series is presented this week by Dr. Roger Wise from the USDA-ARS Ames, IA and Iowa State University .

Seminar Title: “Regulation of immunity during infection of barley with the powdery mildew pathogen”

Biography:  Roger Wise earned his B.S. degree in physiology with high honor from Michigan State University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in genetics from the same institution in 1983, where he investigated the genetics of barley-powdery mildew interactions with Albert Ellingboe. As a post-doc from 1984 to 1986 at the University of Florida with Daryl Pring, he cloned and demonstrated that the novel T-urf13 mitochondrial gene from T-cytoplasm maize caused male sterility and toxin sensitivity and, thus, was the molecular basis for the southern corn leaf blight epidemic of 1970. (T-urf13 was the first cloned plant gene whose product is a target of a pathogen virulence determinant). During a subsequent fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute in Koln, Germany, Wise laid the groundwork for his research as a USDA-ARS research geneticist and professor of plant pathology at Iowa State University, a position he assumed in 1989.

He is active in the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, Interdepartmental Genetics & Genomics, and Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Programs. He was named Affiliate Full Professor in 2000, and in 2015 was promoted to the Executive Senior Scientific and Technical Service within ARS.

He was named an Honorary Fellow by The Scottish Crop Research Institute in 2006 (now renamed James Hutton Institute).  In 2010, he was elected Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and ARS ‘Senior Scientist of the Year’ (Midwest Area).  In 2011, he was further recognized with the USDA Secretary’s Honor Award as part of the inaugural USDA-NIFA Barley CAP. In 2015 he was elected Fellow of AAAS.

Research in the Wise laboratory is focused on the high-throughput functional analysis of important agronomic genes in cereal crops. They use a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, including plant and microbial genetics, molecular biology, plant pathology, and bioinformatics & computational biology.

Seminar Host: Dr. Hailing Jin; hailing.jin@ucr.edu