19 June 2007
Researcher Profiles
Timothy Donohue
GLBRC Principal Investigator
Professor of Bacteriology, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Bioconversion
The principal investigator of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, Donohue is an expert in how microbes harness and convert solar energy. His laboratory researches genetic pathways and networks that microbes use to generate biomass or biofuels from sunlight. His work employs genome sequence, microarrays, proteomics and molecular techniques to determine how the energy in sunlight or renewable nutrients is diverted into cell biomass or biofuel formation.
Ken Keegstra
CLBRC Executive Director
Professor of Plant Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Improved Plant Biomass
Keegstra is a renowned plant biologist and an expert in plant cell wall biochemistry. He has extensive management and scientific experience, having served for 14 years as director of the DOE-funded Plant Research Laboratory at MSU and as faculty member in the Botany Department at UW-Madison for 15 years. As a result, he knows many GLBRC participants from both campuses.
Richard Amasino
Professor of Biochemistry, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Improved Plant Biomass
Amasino’s research focuses on understanding the genetic controls of plant flowering and how flowering is altered in response to environmental variables such as changes in day length or temperature. He also serves as education and outreach coordinator for the GLBRC, capitalizing on his excellence and innovation in teaching science to students. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Amasino has won numerous national awards for his innovative uses of genetics in the classroom and his involvement of undergraduate students in original research.
Sandra Austin-Phillips
Senior Scientist, Biotechnology Center, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Biomass Processing
Austin-Phillips’ research focuses on developing transgenic plants that express cellulases and other value-added enzymes that can facilitate the conversion of cellulosic biomass.
Phillip Brumm
Chief Scientific Officer, Lucigen Corp.
Focus Area: Biomass Processing
Brumm is an expert in the development of microbial enzymes that degrade cellulosic plant biomass. As former technology manager for Enzyme Bio-Systems, Ltd., a producer of enzymes for the grain processing, alcohol and food industries, Brumm was responsible for new product discovery, development, manufacturing scale-up, customer support and IP management.
Cameron Currie
Assistant Professor of Bacteriology, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Biomass Processing
Currie’s research focuses on symbiotic relationships between insects and microbial communities. His work is helping to identify naturally occurring microbial agents that digest cellulosic material, which may lead to the development of novel industrial processes for breaking down biomass material.
Bruce Dale
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Biomass Processing
Dale is an expert on making ethanol from cellulose, plant stalks, grass, corn cobs and other woody plant parts and has developed a patented process called ammonia fiber expansion (AFEX), which makes the breakdown of cellulose more efficient, thus tackling one of the thornier problems of producing ethanol. As associate director of the Office of Biobased Technologies, Dale describes his role as providing “technical reality,” stemming from his 30 years of work in biomass technology, to take such technology from the lab to the marketplace.
James Dumesic
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Bioconversion
Dumesic is an expert on the catalytic conversion of plant compounds into energy products. His lab is researching processes that derive liquid alkalines from carbohydrates in plant biomass, which can then be used to make fuels or byproducts such as high-grade polymers.
Lonnie Ingram
Professor of Microbiology and Cell Science, University of Florida
Focus Area: Bioconversion
Ingram is director of the Florida Center for Renewable Chemicals and Fuels and one of the nation’s premier experts on the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into ethanol. His lab uses genetic engineering techniques to develop novel bacterial agents that can improve plant degradation and fermentation processes.
Robert Landick
Professor of Bacteriology, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Bioconversion
Landick’s research focuses on RNA polymerase, the central enzyme of gene expression in all free-living organisms. His goal is to understand how RNA polymerase is regulated during transcription, which may lead to the identification of novel RNA polymerase inhibitors that can be employed in synthetic microbiology.
Mary S. Lipton
Senior Research Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Focus Area: Enabling Technologies
Lipton is a senior scientist in systems biology, specializing in mass spectrometry and ultra sensitive approaches for globally and quantitatively monitoring gene product expression at the protein level.
David Mead
President and CEO, Lucigen Corp.
Focus Area: Biomass Processing
Mead founded Lucigen in 1998, after 20 years of experience in industrial R&D, sales and management at Bio-Rad, Promega, Molecular Biology Resources, Key Scientific and Chimerx. He has developed more than 30 commercially successful products used widely in biological research.
Julie Mitchell
Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Mathematics, UW-Madison
Focus Area: Enabling Technologies
Mitchell is an expert in the computational analysis of proteins interactions and molecular shape features. She develops tools that allow researchers to analyze molecular shapes and predict areas of protein interactions.
John Ohlrogge
Professor of Plant Biology, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Improved Plant Biomass
Ohlrogge is an expert in plant oils, which are the most energy-rich biomass available from plants. While oils have twice the energy content of carbohydrates and need little energy to extract and convert the oil to fuels, the challenge is yield. Ohlrogge’s lab has made advances in understanding the how plants create oils and has invented new tools to switch on oil biosynthesis in non-traditional oil plants and non-conventional tissues. The goal: oilseed plants suitable for large-scale biofuel production.
Steve Pueppke
Director, Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station
Professor of Plant Pathology, Michigan State University
As director of the Office of Biobased Technologies, Pueppke works to identify, encourage and support research programs that will position MSU as a world leader in the development of the bioeconomy. He was named to the Michigan Renewable Fuels Commission by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm in October 2006. He also serves as assistant vice president for research and graduate studies at MSU.
G. Philip Robertson
Professor of Crop and Soil Sciences, Michigan State University
Focus Area: Development of a Sustainable Bioenergy Economy
A crop and soil scientist and ecosystem ecologist, Robertson focuses much of his research on the role that agriculture plays in greenhouse gas dynamics, and he is internationally known for his expertise in this area. Robertson has been the director of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) at the Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners, Mich., the only site in the national LTER network to focus on agriculture, for almost 20 years.
Michael Sussman
Professor of Biochemistry, UW-Madison
Director, UW-Madison Biotechnology Center
Focus Area: Enabling Technologies
Sussman leads the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center, which pioneers genome-enabled technologies that speed the analysis of plant genetics. An expert on the biochemical and molecular makeup of plants, he led the sequencing of the genome of Arabidopsis, a model plant used in many research projects, and has helped develop core facilities and processes for analyzing biological systems via global gene expression patterns, proteomics and metabolomics.
