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Personal Biography of Steve Lommel, Ph.D.
Dr. Steve Lommel is the Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Research at North Carolina State University and is a Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Plant Pathology and Genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California , Berkeley in 1983. He has previously served on the faculty at Kansas State University and was Assistant Director of the North Carolina Agriculture Research Service. Dr. Lommel has an active research program funded by the NSF to explore the genetic and molecular mechanisms of plant virus pathogenicity. His laboratory is interested in the structure of robust small plant viruses with the goal of using them as viral based nanotechnology cargo vehicles. Dr. Lommel is the co-Director of the Nicotiana Genome Initiative based at North Carolina State University . His teaching responsibilities at North Carolina State University include graduate courses in Plant Pathology and Plant Virology as well as invited lectures in Biotechnology and Genetics. Dr. Lommel is the editor for the Journal Virus Research and sits on the editorial boards of several other plant biology and virology journals. He was also one of the original organizers and current University representative for PIPRA, the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture.