Matthew R. Willmann PhD

Dr Matthew Willmann is the director of the Plant Transformation Facility at Cornell University. Dr Willmann has 25 years of plant science research experience, having studied in several fields, including plant transformation and genome editing, plant pathology, plant development, plant small RNA biology, and plant genomics.

He received his undergraduate degree in general plant science from Cornell University in 1999 and his PhD in genetics from Harvard University in 2004. After postdocs at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr Willmann returned to Cornell in January 2016 as director of the CALS Plant Transformation Facility (PTF). PTF is a service facility that makes transgenic and CRISPR/Cas9 genome-edited plants for Cornell and external faculty. The facility also conducts research to develop transformation protocols for previously untransformed plants and methods for transgene-free CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing. Dr Willmann is a member of the editorial board of The CRISPR Journal, a new journal about genome editing. In an attempt to increase the acceptance of plant biotechnology, he has given many talks for the public about how transgenic and genome-edited plants are made.