Biography

In July 2021, Dr. C. Robin Buell joined the University of Georgia as the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair in Crop Genomics (funded by the Georgia Research Alliance and Georgia Seed Development) in the Department of Crop & Soil Sciences and the Center for Applied Genetic Technologies. Prior to joining UGA, she was a University Distinguished Faculty and MSU Foundation Professor of Plant Biology at Michigan State University (2007-2021), an Associate Investigator at The Institute for Genomic Research (1999-2007), and as Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University (1997-1998).

Her research program focuses on the genome biology of plants including comparative genomics, bioinformatics, and computational biology. She has worked on the genomes of Arabidopsis, rice, potato, maize, switchgrass, sweetpotato, mints, and medicinal plants. With expertise in bioinformatics, one component of Dr. Buell’s research is provision of databases and web-based data-mining tools for the greater scientific community. Dr. Buell maintains the Rice Genome Annotation Project, which receives over 2 million page visits a year. Dr. Buell earned her BSc from the University of Maryland, her MSc from Washington State University, and her PhD from Utah State University. Dr. Buell has an active research group composed of postdoctoral research fellows, research assistants, graduate students, undergraduate students and high school interns and collaborates with scientists across the United States and throughout the world. She has served as an editor at Plant Physiology, the Plant Genome, Crop Science, Frontiers in Plant Genetics and Genomics, and Plant Cell. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement for Science and the American Society of Plant Biologists. At UGA, she is a member of the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics & Genomics and is the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair in Crop Genomics.