IGSP Faculty

A lot of high-throughput technology can now be applied to any organism. To my mind, these approaches are the kinds of things that will differentiate the places that are doing exciting research from those that aren't.

Philip Benfey graduated from the University of Paris and received his PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University under the guidance of Dr. Philip Leder. He did post-doctoral research at Rockefeller University in the field of Plant Molecular Biology working with Dr. Nam-Hai Chua and was appointed an assistant professor there in 1990. In 1991 he moved to New York University where he became an associate professor in 1996 and full professor in 2001. He was the founding director of the Center for Comparative Functional Genomics at NYU.

In 2002 he was named professor and chair of the Biology department at Duke University and in 2003 was named a distinguished professor. He is the recipient of a Helen Hay Whitney post-doctoral fellowship and an NSF pre-doctoral fellowship. He was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. In 2011, Benfey was named an HHMI-GBMF Investigator by The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gordan and Betty Moore Foundation under an initiative to support fundamental plant science research. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Science, Developmental Cell, and BMC Plant Biology. His research focuses on plant developmental genetics and systems biology. In 2007 he formed the start-up company, GrassRoots Biotechnology that uses systems biology approaches to develop new crop traits for the bioenergy, food and industrial markets.

Learn more about Dr. Benfey's research in GenomeLIFE

Recent Publications