Past Members

Robert Last is Barnett Rosenberg Professor of Plant Biochemistry at Michigan State University and recently served as President of the American Society of Plant Biologists. His long-term research interest is understanding how higher plants use metabolism to adapt to environmental factors, and how primary consumers of plant foods – including humans – benefit from these metabolic strategies. Until recently his research was entirely focused on using genetically tractable ‘model organisms’, but his lab now takes advantage of genomics technologies to study the enormous range of metabolic strategies that plants have evolved over tens and hundreds of millions of years.

Gabriela Auge is a group leader at the Institute of Biosciences, Biotechnology and Translational Biology of the University of Buenos Aires. In her lab, they study how plants pass information from one generation to the other to understand how they adjust their life cycles to seasonal changes, investigating the underlying molecular mechanisms and exploring the consequences of transgenerational environmental effects at ecological and evolutionary levels. Gabriela is also a Lecturer of Plant Physiology at the National University of Quilmes and coordinator of the Argentinian Women in Plant Biology and Argentinian Seed Biology Networks.

Arjun Krishnan is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and is a part of two departments: Dept. Computational Math, Science & Engineering and Dept. Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. His team works broadly in the areas of computational genomics and biomedical data science. Before coming to MSU, Arjun completed his bachelor degree in Biotechnology in India before moving to the US for his PhD in Computational Biology at Virginia Tech. Following that, he completed his postdoctoral research at Princeton University.