Brian Staskawicz

Brian John Staskawicz is an American plant scientist and professor of plant and microbial biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as scientific director of agricultural genomics at the Innovative Genomics Institute. His research made seminal contributions to understanding how plant pathogens infect their hosts and how plants mount an immune response, including the cloning of the first pathogen effector gene and one of the first plant NOD-like receptors, and he played a major role in establishing the plant Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism for this research. He now leads efforts to use genome editing on agricultural crops for resistance to disease and other stresses. He is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2025.