Pat Zambryski
Pat Zambryski is professor of plant and microbial biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is one of the pioneers in the development of genetic engineering in plants by discovering how the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens transfers DNA into the plants it infects. Fundamental insights applicable to numerous areas of bacterial and plant biology have been uncovered by investigations into Agrobacterium.
Pat Zambryski grew up in Montreal, Canada, where she graduated from McGill University, and earned her PhD from the University of Colorado. After postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), she spent five years as a senior investigator at Ghent University in Belgium. She is a Fellow at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology, and Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Prof. Zambryski's current research focuses on two distinct areas. In microbial biology she continues to work with her lab on unraveling the molecular mechanisms utilised by Agrobacterium that leads to the genetic transformation of plant cells. In plant biology she and her lab study how plant cells communicate with each other via unique plant specific intercellular structures called plasmodesmata.
At the beginning of October 2014, Professor Patricia Zambryski will visit the University of Strasbourg as part of the USIAS short visits programme. She will be welcomed by Manfred Heinlein.