Alex Cantó-Pastor

Alex Cantó-Pastor joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. He is a plant geneticist and pathologist. His research focuses on how plants let some beneficial soil microbes into their roots while keeping disease-causing ones (pathogens) at bay. His lab will combine computational and molecular approaches to identify key genes in plant-microbe interactions, and will manipulate these genes to enhance the benefits of such relationships. The goal of this work is to provide insight and tools that tackle the global challenges of food security and sustainable agricultural production. Alex was a postdoc at the University of California Davis. Before that, he received his PhD in Plant Sciences at University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and his BSc in Biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain).