Deborah P. Delmer

Biosketch

Deborah Delmer received her B.A. degree with honors in Bacteriology in 1963 from Indiana University and her Ph.D. in Biology in 1968 from the University of California San Diego. She has held faculty positions at Michigan State University, The Hebrew University, and University of California Davis also serving as Chair of the Section of Plant Biology. Her research focused on the structure and synthesis of plant cell walls, with emphasis on the mechanism of synthesis of cellulose. In 2004, she received from the American Chemical Society the Anselme Payen Award in recognition of excellence in the science and chemical technology of cellulose. She also served as President of The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), and, in 2004, she was elected to membership in the US National Academy of Sciences. A Fellow of ASPB, she also received its Public Service Award and the Charles Reid Barnes Award. From 2002-2007, she served as Associate Director for Food Security for the Rockefeller Foundation involved with grant making and policy relating to the role of biotechnology in developing world agriculture. She has served on the Board of Directors for ICRISAT, for the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR) and currently for The American Chestnut Foundation. She is now retired and resides in the mountains of North Carolina.

Research Interests

Delmer obtained a PhD in biology at UCSD where her thesis work represented some of the first studies of the biosynthesis of tryptophan in plants. As post-doc with Peter Albersheim at the University of Colorado, she pioneered structural, kinetic and regulatory studies on purified sucrose synthase. As faculty member at the DOE-MSU Plant Research Lab, she began her decades long journey to uncover the mechanisms by which plants synthesize cellulose using cotton fibers as a model system; her lab was also the first to demonstrate a role for lipid intermediates in protein glycosylation in plants. At The Hebrew University and later at UC Davis, research included discovery of a membrane-associated form of sucrose synthase proposed to play a role in channeling substrate to callose and cellulose synthases as well as the first identification of plant genes that encode plant cellulose synthases, setting the stage for further genomic and structural studies of cellulose synthase genes and proteins. Delmer’s career later took a giant leap when she abandoned research to serve as Program Director in Food Security at The Rockefeller Foundation in New York City. Her two principal efforts were directed at: 1). obtaining access to intellectual property rights for discoveries relevant to agriculture in the developing world; and 2) development of grants for training and collaborative research in plant biochemistry and molecular biology to young scientists in Africa while paired with scientists in the developed world. Delmer is now I retired to the mountains of North Carolina.