Keith Slotkin
Founder & Chief Scientific Officer
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center / University of Missouri
Keith Slotkin holds a joint position at the University of Missouri and Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, where he is the Vice President of Commercialization. He has studied mobile ‘jumping gene’ Transposable Elements for 25+ years, focused on understanding how they reshape plant genomes as natural genome engineers.
His research career began at The University of Arizona, then he received his Ph.D. in Plant Genetics from the University of California-Berkeley. Keith performed his postdoctoral research as an NIH-funded fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory before starting his own lab as an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University in 2009. In 2018 he was attracted to the St. Louis AgTech ecosystem and moved his laboratory to the Danforth Plant Science Center.
The Slotkin lab has investigated how plant cells control the activity of transposable elements, and through this work the Slotkin lab has learned enough to switch this question around to now ask how can we control the activity of transposable elements for genome engineering in plant cells.