R. Keith Slotkin,
PhD
Member, Interim Co-Vice President of Research; Professor, Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri - Columbia
Keith Slotkin is the Interim Co-Vice President for Research and is a Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the Division of Biological Sciences. Half of his research program focuses on how plant cells identify and control sequences that insert into plant DNA, called transposable elements and transgenes. These discoveries enable the other half of his research program, which aims to create tools that function in living plant cells to improve crops through genome engineering. Keith is also the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Spearhead Bio, a startup leading the next generation of powerful native genome engineering tools to accelerate the development and launch of new transgenic and non-transgenic crops. Keith received a B.S. from the University of Arizona, his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, and was a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
