KEITH SLOTKIN

DONALD DANFORTH PLANT SCIENCE CENTRE, USA

Keith Slotkin is a Vice President for Research and a Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, USA, and holds a joint position as a Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Half of his research program focuses on how plant cells identify and control sequences that insert into DNA, called transposable elements and transgenes. These discoveries enable the other half of his research program, which aims to create tools that function in living plant cells to improve crops through genome engineering. Keith is also the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Spearhead Bio, a startup company generating powerful native genome engineering tools to accelerate the development and launch of new non-transgenic crops. Keith received his B.S. from the University of Arizona, his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, and was a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.