Craig Schenck: Plant Physiology First Author

Craig Schenck, first author of “Natural Variation Meets Synthetic Biology: Promiscuous Trichome-Expressed Acyltransferases from Nicotiana“

Current Position: Assistant Professor Department of Biochemistry University of Missouri

Education: NSF Postdoctoral Fellow Michigan State University, Ph.D. Botany, University of Wisconsin, MS and BS Plant Biology, Ohio University

Non-scientific interests: gardening, biking, running, brewing

Brief Bio: I’m currently an Assistant Professor in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Missouri. My group is interested in the biochemical mechanisms that enable plants to produce structurally diverse metabolites. We use a combination of analytical chemistry, comparative transcriptomics/genomics, and biochemical methods to tackle these challenging problems. Our long-term goals are to understand the fundamental rules that govern evolution of metabolic pathways and to engineer crops for increased resilience through production of diverse biologically active metabolites.