Daniel F. Klessig, associate director of Rutgers University's Waksman Institute, has been named president of the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) for Plant Research Inc. on the Cornell campus, effective Sept. 1.
Klessig, who becomes the seventh leader for the institute, succeeds Charles J. Arntzen, who will take a year's sabbatical leave to do research at the Maricopa Research Station at Arizona State University and then will return to BTI as emeritus president and project leader.
Klessig's area of research is how plants protect themselves against microbial pathogens, which he studies using the tools of plant genetics and molecular and cellular biology. He has been a professor and associate director at the Waksman Institute since 1985. Previously he was assistant professor (1980-1983) and associate professor (1983-1985) in the Department of Cellular, Viral and Molecular Biology at the University of Utah. From 1979 to 1980 he was a staff scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.
Klessig earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1971. As a Marshall Scholar, he earned a B.Sc. in molecular biology from the University of Edinburgh in 1973. He earned his doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1978 under the direction of Ray Gesteland and James D. Watson, who won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for his co-discovery of DNA. Klessig has been a Searle scholar (1982-1985) and a McKnight scholar (1983-1986).
Last year, the Boyce Thompson Institute celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding and the 25th anniversary of its affiliation with Cornell and subsequent relocation to the Cornell campus from its original location in Yonkers, N.Y.
With a $10 million endowment of his own money, William Boyce Thompson formed the institute, which officially opened Sept. 24, 1924, in Yonkers. He urged BTI scientists to study "why and how plants grow, why they languish or thrive, how their diseases may be conquered, how their development may be stimulated by the regulation of the elements which contribute to their life."
Today, BTI employs about 140 researchers, including 21 senior scientists, many of whom hold adjunct professor positions with Cornell. The institute has an endowment of about $76 million. It receives about $2.8 million from federal government agencies, about $1.5 million from non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations and about $1.2 million from industry on an annual basis.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |