AMES, IOWA — Jeffry Sander, a pioneering molecular and computational biologist at Corteva Agriscience, has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Iowa State University Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology (GDCB). Sander received the award at a ceremony on October 24 in Ames. The award recognizes outstanding alumni from GDCB, which is a department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

At Corteva Agriscience, Sander has led the deployment of trait creation technologies, including site-specific integration for creation of complex trait loci and Corteva’s multi-crop CRISPR/ Cas gene-editing pipeline. He now leads the vector construction group, the protein engineering group and a cross-functional team charged with managing comprehensive resource of the trait generation pipelines.

Prior to joining Corteva Agriscience, Sander served as a joint post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He was subsequently appointed an instructor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and an associate in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. During his academic tenure, Sander employed informatics, machine learning, bacterial selection, protein engineering, human cell culture and laboratory automation to advance the leading edge of genome editing across all three major platforms: zinc fingers, TALENs and CRISPR/Cas.

Sander currently holds four patents and has been named among the world’s most highly cited researchers by Clarivate Analytics (previously Thomson Reuters –World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds) for each of the last three years.

Sanders earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and his Ph.D. in bioinformatics and computational biology, both from Iowa State University.

About the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

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