Nationality American Name Steven Tanksley | ||
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Alma mater Colorado State UniversityUniversity of California-Davis Notable awards Alexander von Humboldt Foundation AwardMartin Gibbs Medal of the American Society of Plant BiologistsWolf Prize in Agriculture | ||
Steven Dale Tanksley (born April 7, 1954) is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Breeding and Biometry and chair of the Genomics Initiative Task Force at Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
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Education
Tanksley received a bachelor's degree in agronomy from Colorado State University in 1976 and a doctorate in genetics from the University of California-Davis in 1979.
Career and research
Tanksley joined the faculty at Cornell in 1985 as an associate professor of plant breeding, and became full professor in 1994. In 1993, Tanksley was the head of a Cornell research group that isolated and subsequently cloned a disease-resistance gene in tomato plants. The research is believed to be the first successful DNA map-based cloning.
Awards and honors
He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 1995. Tanksley has received the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award, the Martin Gibbs Medal of the American Society of Plant Biologists, and the Wolf Prize in Agriculture. Tanksley was also awarded the Kumho International Science Award in 2005 for his work in molecular genetics. In 2016, he won the Japan Prize.