Diane Bassham

Dr. Diane C. Bassham is a Distinguished Professor of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology at Iowa State University, USA. She received her B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham and Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Warwick. After completing a post-doctoral appointment in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University, she joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 2001. In 2013, Prof. Bassham was chosen as the first Walter E. and Helen Parke Loomis Professor of Plant Physiology. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research focuses on trafficking of macromolecules to the plant vacuole in response to environmental signals. A major project is analysis of the mechanism and regulation of autophagy, a vacuolar degradation pathway, in response to abiotic stress, hormones and other signals in Arabidopsis. Autophagy is required for the tolerance of multiple stress conditions, and therefore is a promising target for generation of stress-resistant plant varieties. To this end, she is also analyzing the autophagy pathway in maize, a key crop in Iowa and worldwide.