Eric D Brenner International Plant Molecular Biology Conference 2024

Eric D Brenner

I currently serve as an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Pace University. Since my teens I have been fascinated with biology, particularly plants. Initially, I thought I would simply become a farmer, but after I completed my undergraduate degree in both botany and agronomy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was riveted with the amazing new molecular technology being developed so I chose to study plant molecular biology for a Ph.D. at The University of California, Davis, where I worked on gene expression during nematode infection of tomato roots. During my postdoctoral studies at New York University, I worked on defining the role of glutamate receptors in plants. Following my post-doc I became an Assistant Curator at The New York Botanical Garden, where I helped build the Genomics Department and served as the project manager for the New York Plant Genomics Consortium that included NYU, Cold Spring Harbor Labs, and The Museum of Natural History. I then took a position as an Assistant Clinical Professor at New York University in the Biology Department teaching undergraduate students. Recently I was hired as an Associate Professor at Pace. I enjoy teaching and have developed a number of active learning-based biology teaching labs, including the NSF Funded, "Plant Tracer", (http://www.planttracer.com) which enables students to contribute primary knowledge to understand the genetics of plant movement by using a cell phone App to quantify plant movement with movement-capture technology.