Interactions

​Anjali Iyer-Pascuzzi is a professor in the Botany and Plant Pathology Department at Purdue University. She grew up in Los Angeles and earned her B.S. degree in molecular environmental biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She then moved across the country to Cornell University for both her M.S. degree in plant pathology (with Greg Martin) and Ph.D. degree in plant genetics (with Susan McCouch). After a postdoc in root biology with Philip Benfey at Duke University, she started her own laboratory at Purdue in 2013. At Purdue she combines her love of plant–microbe interactions with plant development. Research in her laboratory is currently aimed at elucidating mechanisms underlying root resistance to the bacterial wilt disease pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum in tomato and maize responses to Phyllachora maydis, the causal agent of tar spot disease. Her work spans biological scales—from cell types to whole plants—and combines tools from cell and developmental biology, genomics, and phenomics to improve understanding of plant–microbe interactions. She has previously served in leadership positions in ASPB and is excited to take a more active role in IS-MPMI as the editor-in-chief for Interactions!