Dr. David Mackey has been named Associate Director of CAPS.

Dr. Mackey serves as an Associate Director of the Center for Applied Plant Sciences, and in that capacity as the Director of the Translational Plant Sciences Graduate Program (tpsgp.osu.edu). In this role, he develops and implements training programs at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels. 

Please find Dr. Mackey’s bio below:
 
Dr. David Mackey received his B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Penn State in 1991. Next he earned his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1997. Following a three year post-doc at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he moved to Ohio State in 2002 as a faculty member in the Department of Horticulture & Crop Science. He currently holds the rank of Professor with appointments in the Departments of Horticulture & Crop Science and Molecular Genetics and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Plant Pathology. Dr. Mackey’s research focuses on the interaction between plants and plant-pathogenic bacteria, with projects investigating the nature of the plant immune system, how the plant immune system is suppressed by bacterial virulence proteins and toxins, as well as how plant physiology is altered by bacterial virulence proteins to create a nutritive and aqueous environment conducive to bacterial proliferation. The work is conducted in the model plants Arabidopsis thaliana and Nicotiana benthamiana as well as the model grass/crop plant Zea mays.