PMB Seminars

Plant Gene Expression Center Seminars

The Plant Gene Expression Center hosts seminars throughout the year. The schedule can be found at pgec.usda.gov

Special Seminars, Endowed Lectures

The department hosts several seminars and endowed lectures throughout the academic year. Endowed lectures are paid for with private funds invested and held by the Regents of the University. The Daniel I. Arnon Lecture was established with resources from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The endowment also supports graduate students who are designated Arnon Fellows. The Bob B. Buchanan and Harry Tsujimoto Lectures were established with a generous gift from the K/T Foundation of San Francisco. The Taylor-White Lecture is the result of a collaboration of longtime colleagues.

Thomas J. White and John W. Taylor Lecture in Microbial Biology

Our newest endowed lecture will debut in Fall Semester, 2013. It was planned when Dr. White was the Regents’ Lecturer for the Berkeley Campus, Fall Semester 2012 - Spring Semester 2013. It commemorates a scientific collaboration spanning three decades between Dr. White and Professor John Taylor of PMB.

White and Taylor began their collaboration on fungal molecular evolution in 1982 when Taylor invited White to an informal seminar in the Botany Department on the Berkeley campus to present his Cetus Corporation research on fungal enzymes that convert plant cell walls to sugar.  Following that meeting, they used a cloned fungal ribosomal DNA to show that fungi were not close relatives of red algae (Kwok et al. 1986); a modest accomplishment, but one of the first efforts to apply molecular evolution to fungi. Read more about the Taylor-White Collaboration

Arnon Lecture

The Arnon Lecture honors the late Professor Daniel I. Arnon (1910-1994). Arnon spent his career at Berkeley, obtaining his Ph.D. in plant nutrition with Dennis R. Hoagland and later joining the faculty. He is best known for his pioneering research in the fields of photosynthesis and plant nutrition. His career is recounted in a memoir written for the National Academy of Sciences. The lecture is held annually during Spring Semester. Speakers have made distinguished contributions to photosynthesis or a related field and are selected by the Arnon Lecture Committee. 

Buchanan Lecture

The Bob. B. Buchanan Lecture honors Professor Bob B. Buchanan, a longtime faculty member in the department, who also serves as Executive Associate Dean of the College of Natural Resources. Professor Buchanan did undergraduate work at Emory and Henry College and obtained a Ph.D. in Microbiology from Duke University. After completing postdoctoral research with the late Professor Jesse C. Rabinowitz in the Department of Biochemistry, Buchanan joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1963. He is known for his contributions to microbiology, photosynthesis and plant biochemistry.

Speakers are typically young investigators on the way to achieving prominence in plant biology. They are selected by postdoctoral scholars in the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology.

Tsujimoto Lecture

The Tsujimoto Lecture honors Harry Y. Tsujimoto, an accomplished former Berkeley staff member. He did undergraduate work at Cornell University and obtained an M.S. in plant nutrition from UC Berkeley. Daniel Arnon was his thesis advisor. Tsujimoto spent 25 years as a member of the Arnon research group where he participated in major discoveries on photophosphorylation and ferredoxin. Graduate students select the speaker, a recognized individual in plant biology or microbial biology.

Other Seminars on Campus

Nutritional Science and Toxicology

Integrative Biology

Molecular and Cell Biology

Structural Biology Series, College of Chemistry

Henry Wheeler Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases

Environmental Science and Policy Management, College of Natural Resources