Richard W. Michelmore

Biosketch

Richard Michelmore, PhD is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis. He earned his BA and PhD in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, UK. He had a postdoctoral travel fellowship from the Royal Society and the Indian National Science Academy to study tropical plant diseases at the University of Karnataka and ICRISAT. He then had a postdoctoral research fellowship at Cambridge University, after which he joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1982. He was the founding Director of the Genome Center at UC Davis from 2003 until 2024. He has an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Exeter, UK. He is a fellow of the AAAS. He serves as an advisor to projects funded by the Gates Foundation aimed at increasing global food security.

Research Interests

Richard Michelmore’s multidisciplinary research utilizes molecular, genetic, and evolutionary approaches to plant genomics. He pioneered several molecular marker technologies for crop improvement; he developed Bulked Segregant Analysis as an efficient genetic mapping strategy that is still widely used for diverse species 35 years later. He characterizes the genetic architecture and evolution of disease resistance genes in plants. He is dissecting the molecular basis of disease resistance and the interactions between pathogen effectors and plant resistance proteins. He developed genomics tools for multiple species and enabled a broad range of genomics approaches to crop and weedy species, including sequencing and assembly of genomes of lettuce and several of its pathogens. He specializes in studying downy mildews, an important but understudied group of plant pathogens. He advocates for information-driven deployment of resistance genes in crop plants to provide more durable disease resistance. In addition, he is interested in fostering research to enhance global food security. His interests also include applications of DNA sequencing to all areas of biology and its increasing impact on society. He has published over 240 scientific papers. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, he was a major contributor to the team that provided rapid, high throughput testing for SARS-CoV-2 to the UC Davis campus and the City of Davis and deployed rapid genotyping and sequencing to monitor for variants of concern in collaboration with the California Department of Public Health.