ASPB Leadership
Gustavo MacIntosh
Gustavo MacIntosh is a Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Iowa State University. For the vast majority of his career, he has been a member of ASPB and operated in the United States, but he became a plant scientist in Argentina. Gustavo did his postdoc training at the DOE-Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University and while there became immersed in the molecular biology of Arabidopsis and yeast. He began working on ribonucleases, which remains his main research interest. Gustavo has been at Iowa State University since 2003, where he built a laboratory investigating the functional characterization of plant RNases and the mechanisms and regulation of RNA salvage and cellular homeostasis.
Leeann Thornton
Leeann Thornton is a Professor of Biology at The College of New Jersey. At TCNJ, Leeann has taught a variety of courses ranging from first-year biology and general seminars to advanced plant genetics and senior capstone courses. She was recently the First-Year Seminar Program Director. Leeann has been active in ASPB for most of her career and has served on the Membership Committee and Council. Leeann helped establish the Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUI) section to get more scientists from colleges and universities that do not grant PhDs involved in ASPB. Prior to TCNJ, Leeann did her postdoc work at Washington University in St. Louis and began studying the role of cytochrome P450 enzymes in plant responses to the environment. She has studied these enzymes in Arabidopsis, rice, and maize to determine the structure and function relationships for subfamilies within the CYP72 clade.
Katayoon (Katie) Dehesh
Katayoon (Katie) Dehesh is the Director of the Institute of Integrative Genome Biology at the University of California – Riverside (UCR), and a Distinguished Professor in molecular biochemistry. Previously, while at UC Davis, Katie served as the Chair of the Plant Biology Graduate Program, and Chair of the Emphasis in Biotechnology Program, where they expanded their educational program to include industrial experience, by actively involving various industrial partners in agricultural and medical fields. Prior to joining the academic ranks, Katie worked for 10 years in the Plant Biotechnology sector, generating 11 patents. Katie’s research focus is on the evolutionarily conserved stress signaling and transduction pathways shared between plants and other organisms, such as eubacteria and Apicomplexa, as a means to providing an integrated view of the origins and patterns of divergence in adaptive networks.