Jonathan Jones Jonathan Jones, head of the charitably-funded Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, is a leading plant geneticist and authority on plant disease resistance. He studied Natural Sciences in Cambridge, UK, 1972−1976, finishing with a degree in Botany. He then took up a Ph.D. project on repeated DNA sequences and heterochromatin in cereal chromosomes, jointly supervised by Gabriel Dover at the Genetics Department in Cambridge and Dick Flavell at the Plant Breeding Institute. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Fred Ausubel in Harvard's Department of Cellular Biology, he worked from 1983−1988 at a plant biotech startup company, Advanced Genetic Sciences, in Oakland, CA. There, he worked on maximizing transgenic expression of proteins in plants and applied this to engineering high levels of chitinase expression for fungal disease resistance. He also initiated transgenic studies on maize transposons in tobacco. Since joining the Sainsbury Laboratory in 1988, he has led a group that has focused on using molecular genetic analysis to isolate plant disease resistance (R) genes and study their function. The Sainsbury Laboratory is located at the John Innes Centre in Norwich and is supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation.