UC Davis Genome Center Founding Director Richard Michelmore Steps Down
Quick Summary
- After a 20-year tenure as founding director of the UC Davis Genome Center, Richard Michelmore is returning to his position as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and to his research on plant pandemics.
This article originally appeared on the College of Biological Sciences News.
During his 20-year tenure as founding director of the UC Davis Genome Center, Richard Michelmore, a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Plant Sciences, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Medical Microbiology and Immunology, recruited more than 20 faculty members, led the center to prominence as a hub of technology-driven biology, and made national headlines by implementing an innovative, community-scale saliva-based COVID test. Quite the legacy for someone who never wanted the job in the first place.
“I had no intention of being the Genome Center director,” says Michelmore, who had a major role in the center’s initial planning, which grew out of a call by then-provost Bob Grey for interdisciplinary initiatives in the late 1990s. “I thought we needed to coordinate plant genomics on campus,” says Michelmore, who suggested 17 new full-time faculty appointments in genomics and bioinformatics. “The med school and vet school were talking along similar lines, and it all got wrapped up into the Genome Center initiative.”
Read the full article here.
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Kate Washington, Ph.D., is a freelance writer based in Sacramento and the author of Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, TIME and Sunset, among other publications.