Dr. Sunghun Park is a Professor of crop functional genomics at Kansas State University. He received his BS in Agronomy from Seoul National University in 1987, MS in Agronomy from Seoul National University in 1989, and PhD in Plant Physiology from Texas A&M University in 1995. His research interests include understanding redox-mediated plant adaptation mechanisms to abiotic stresses and physiological disorders in fruits and vegetables that involve calcium regulation and abiotic stress. Dr. Park has successfully established a genetic engineering system using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation in crop species to determine how the genome sequences cause plant phenotypes. He is also an expert in gene transformation, gene functional analysis, and comparative genome-wide transcriptional profiling.
Dr. Myeong-Je Cho obtained a B.S. and M.S. in Agronomy from
Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in Soybean Physiology and
Biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 and
carried out a postdoctoral study on Soybean Transformation/Molecular Biology at the
same university. Later, he worked as a Specialist on Cereal Transformation and
Gene Expression in the Plant and Microbial Biology Department at the University
of California-Berkeley. In 2001, Myeong-Je joined a biotech company, Byotix,
Inc. in Richmond, CA, as a cofounder and VP to lead the Plant Biotechnology and
Genomics Programs. In 2004, he worked as a Research Scientist/Manager at
DuPont-Pioneer for 11 years. Myeong-Je joined IGI in November 2016 and is
currently the Director and PI of the Plant Genomics and Transformation
Facility. He also serves as a Scientific Advisor at FarmHannong, Ltd., a LG
company, and as an Adjunct Professor at Jeju National University, S. Korea. He
has published over 70 papers/four book chapters regarding plant tissue
culture/transformation, gene expression, gene isolation/characterization and
genome editing. He has 13 US patents
issued and 11 pending.
Dr. Frank White is a full professor in the Department of
Plant Pathology at Kansas State University (KSU). He has since been involved in
experimental research, graduating from UW with a B.S. degree in molecular
biology with honors in 1974, and he received his Ph.D. degree in 1981. Dr.
Frank White continued his work at Seattle under the direction of Nester and Milton
Gordon until 1985, when he joined the Department of Plant Pathology at KSU. Dr.
Frank White has coauthored 10 reviews and 46 original referred articles,
including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.), Nature,
MPMI, The Journal of Bacteriology, Cell, The Plant Cell, Plant Physiology, and
Molecular Plant Pathology.
Dr. Sanzhen Liu holds BS and MS degrees from Xiamen
University and completed his PhD and postdoctoral research at Iowa State
University. Currently, he serves as a Professor in the Department of Plant
Pathology at Kansas State University. His research
primarily focuses on genetics, genomics, and computational approaches applied
to maize, wheat, and their associated pathogens. Dr. Liu has developed valuable
experimental tools and computational pipelines for genetic and genomic
analyses. Dr. Liu has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers, featured in
prestigious journals like the Plant Cell, Nature Communications, Genome
Biology, and PLoS Genetics. His research has garnered over 9,000 citations. His research is supported by the NSF, USDA, DOE, and Corteva
Agriscience in the US.
