ASPB Leadership
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.
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.
Maureen McCann
Maureen C. McCann is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University, Indiana since 2003, and is a member of Purdue’s Center for Plant Biology, and Director of the NEPTUNE Center for Power and Energy, funded by the Office of Naval Research. As an instructor she teaches Eukaryotic Genetics to juniors and seniors. As a plant biologist with a passion for sustainable production of food, feed, fuel, chemicals and materials from lignocellulosic biomass, she has 104 peer-reviewed publications, 24 of which are published in The Plant Cell and Plant Physiology.