Gloria M. Coruzzi
New York University
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Primary Section: 25, Plant Biology Secondary Section: 62, Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2019)
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Biosketch
Gloria Coruzzi is the Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Biology at New York University. She is a plant biologist recognized for her pioneering work in plant systems biology. She is known particularly for developing and implementing experimental and computational methods to predict and validate gene regulatory networks that control plant nitrogen use efficiency and therefore underlie crop production and sustainability. A native New Yorker, she is an alumna of Hunter College High School (1972) and received her Bachelor of Science at Fordham University (1976). She decoded the yeast mitochondrial for her Ph.D. in Molecular & Cell Biology at NYU School of Medicine (1979), and later as a post-doctoral associate at Columbia University. She initiated gene cloning studies in plants as an NIH post-doctoral fellow (1980) at Rockefeller University, where later as an Assistant (1983) and Associate (1989) Professor she characterized the N-assimilatory pathway genes using Arabidopsis mutants. She initiated studies on plant genomics and systems biology at New York University (1991), where, as Full Professor and the Chair of Biology (2003-2011) she founded NYU?s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. Coruzzi has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005) and a fellow of the American Society of Plant Biology (2010), is a recipient of the ASPB Stephen Hales Prize (2015), is a distinguished counselor to the New York Botanical Garden (2017), and is elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2019). Her editorial board service has included Plant Physiology, G3: Genes, Genomes and Genetics, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has served on numerous advisory boards including the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Scientific Advisory Committee and their Plant Program Advisory Board. In addition to her research, Prof. Coruzzi is devoted to mentoring undergraduate and high school STEM students to apply computational approaches to biology.
Research Interests
Gloria Coruzzi's research in plant systems biology resides in Pasteur's Quadrant-the scientific space where investigations of basic processes aim ultimately to be beneficial to society. To this end, the overarching contribution of her research has been to develop systems biology approaches to predictively model and experimentally validate how internal and external perturbations affect processes, pathways and networks controlling plant metabolism, growth, development and field outcomes. Specifically, her systems biology studies have enabled her laboratory to predictively model and validate high throughput the gene regulatory networks that control nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE), a trait that impacts the environment, energy and human nutrition. Her current studies exploit time - the 4th and largely unexplored dimension of transcriptional networks - to capture transient interactions between transcription factors and their genome-wide targets, and to accurately forecast network states at future time-points, a major goal of the systems biology community at large. Importantly, her lab's studies in the model plant Arabidopsis bridge bench-to-field work and have uncovered gene networks associated with enhanced nitrogen use in crops including maize and rice. Finally, to further exploit plant genome diversity for practical progress, her lab - in collaboration with colleagues at the New York Botanical Garden, the American Museum of Natural History, the Cold Spring Harbor labs and the Courant Institute - has developed a functional phylogenomic pipeline that can identify specific genes associated with the evolution of key agronomic traits across the seed plants. To enable such systems biology studies more broadly, her lab has developed and embodied various tools for network analysis into a software platform (www.virtualplant.org) that is available and widely used by the plant community to identify the networks underlying numerous biological processes and pathways underlying plant growth and development.
