Recognizing Plant Physiology first authors: David E. Cook

David E. Cook, first author of Long Read Annotation (LoReAn): automated eukaryotic genome annotation based on long-read cDNA sequencing

Current Position: Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas USA.

Education: PhD in Plant Pathology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, BSc and MSc in Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences from Virginia Tech.

Non-scientific Interests: Spending time with my wife and three kids, enjoying the outdoors.

Brief bio: I am guided by an interest to understand how biology works and to push boundaries. Following my PhD thesis work discovering the genes responsible for an important resistance trait in soybean to soybean-cyst nematode, I wanted to expand my experiences. I had the opportunity to Join Bart Thomma’s group at Wageningen University working on fungal pathogenesis and genomics. It was a fantastic time where I got to work with many great colleagues on projects such as the development of LoReAn described here. In 2017, I started my own lab at Kansas State University where we study chromatin dynamics and genome structure related to fungal pathogenesis and the development of RNA-targeting CRISPR for use in plant biology and biotech.