Corporate Info

Robert A. Martienssen, Ph.D.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Professor

Dr. Martienssen is a member of the Board of Directors and a scientific co-founder of the Company. He is a Professor in plant genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York and leads the plant biology group there. Dr. Martienssen is an expert on the methylation of transposable elements in plant genomes. As well as developing strategies to exploit this methylation in genome sequencing, he has also investigated the link between DNA methylation, histone methylation, and RNA interference in plants and yeast. His work, along with that of his colleagues, was awarded the “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science magazine in 2002. Dr. Martienssen was a co-recipient of the Kumho International Science Award in 2001, and was the 2003 recipient of the Newcomb Cleveland award, an acknowledgment by AAAS that his 2002 paper in Science magazine was the best of the year. He has also developed reverse genetics strategies using transposons in maize and Arabidopsis that have become powerful and widely used tools in plant genetics research. Dr. Martienssen received his B.A. in Natural Sciences (Genetics) from Cambridge University, England, in 1982, and his Ph.D. from the Plant Breeding Institute and Cambridge University in 1986. He held an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley from 1986-1988 and has been on the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1989.