Director, UC Davis Genome Center
Distinguished Professor, Department of Plant Sciences
Novozymes Chair of Genomics
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA
Dr. Blake Meyers is Director of the UC Davis Genome Center, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, and holds the Novozymes Chair of Genomics at the University of California, Davis. He is internationally recognized for pioneering work on the functions, biogenesis, and evolution of small RNAs in plants. His research has increasingly focused on reproductive development and phased, secondary small interfering RNAs (phasiRNAs), integrating molecular biology and bioinformatics to study these pathways across diverse plant systems. Applied goals of this work include the development of hybrid crops through small RNA-directed male sterility.
Dr. Meyers attended the University of Chicago, and he received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Genetics from UC Davis. Dr. Meyers began his independent faculty career at the University of Delaware, where he held the Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professorship, before moving in 2016 to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. There, he was a Member and Principal Investigator and he held a faculty appointment at the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he held the title of Curators’ Distinguished Professor. He moved to his current position at UC Davis in 2024.
He was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2012, as a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) in 2017, and as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2022. From 2020 to 2024, Dr. Meyers served as Editor-in-Chief of The Plant Cell, a leading journal in plant biology.