Markita Landry

Talk Title: Nanomaterials enable genetic manipulation of plants without transgene integration

Markita Landry is an associate professor in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

She received a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics and a Certificate in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her current research centers on the development of synthetic nanoparticle-polymer conjugates for imaging neuromodulation in the brain, and for the delivery of genetic materials into plants. The Landry lab exploits the highly tunable chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials for the creation of bio-mimetic structures, molecular imaging, and plant genome editing. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards and a consultant for several major agricultural companies. She is a recent recipient of over 30 early career awards, including awards from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the McKnight Foundation, the DARPA Young Investigator program, the Beckman Young Investigator program, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the NSF CAREER award, is a Sloan Research Fellow, an FFAR New Innovator, and is a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.