Research

Jeff Dangl is the John N. Couch Professor of Biology, an Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, and a member of the Curriculum in Genetics at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, USA. He received dual Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and English (Modern Literature) form Stanford University in 1981. He received his PhD in 1986 for work concerning structure-function relationships among of chimaeric monoclonal antibodies from the Genetics Department of the Stanford Medical School in the laboratory of Prof. Leonard A. Herzenberg. In 1986, Dangl was awarded an National Science Foundation Plant Biology Fellowship to pursue post-doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Plant Breeding in Cologne, Germany, in the department of Prof. Klaus Hahlbrock. In 1989, Dangl began his own group at the Max Delbrück Laboratory, also in Cologne. In 1995, the Dangl lab moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Dangl lab has contributed significantly to the development of Arabidopsis as a tool to analyze plant-pathogen interactions and define the molecules in the plant immune system over the last 20 years. Dangl is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS, 2007) and the German Academy of Sciences (“Die Leopoldina”, 2003). Dangl was a member of the NAS National Research Council’s (NRC) Board of Life Sciences (2003-2008) and was Chair and lead author of two NRC reviews of the National Plant Genome Research Initiative (2002 and 2008). He also was a co-lead author on the NSF “The Multinational Coordinated Arabidopsis 2010 Project. Functional Genomics and the Virtual Plant: A blueprint for understanding how plants are built and how to improve them” (2000) and a Committee Member and author on the NSF “2020 Vision for Biology Workshop: The role of plants in addressing grand challenges in biology” (2008).

Dangl is a past elected member of the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee, and the NSF ‘Eukaryotic Genetics’ and NIH ‘Genetics, Variation and Evolution’ grant panels. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Science, Cell, and PNAS and is co-Editor in Chief of Current Opinions in Plant Biology. Research in the Dangl lab is funded by NIH, NSF, DOE and HFSP.