Adam Bogdanove
Adam J. Bogdanove (born 1964) is a professor of Plant Pathology at Cornell University. He played a central role in developing TAL effector–based DNA targeting tools and discovered TAL effector modularity in 2009 with Matthew Moscou. He has led genome editing applications and helped popularize Golden Gate Cloning for designing custom TAL effectors. Bogdanove is widely recognized for his work in revolutionizing DNA targeting and genome editing.
Education: He earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Yale University in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from Cornell University in 1997, followed by postdoctoral work at Purdue University.
Career: Bogdanove began his academic career in 2000 at Iowa State University as one of the first faculty hires of the Plant Science Institute. There, he made the 2006 landmark discovery of how TAL effectors recognize target sequences and how they increase disease susceptibility by manipulating host gene expression. This work helped pave the way for genome editing technologies like CRISPR.
In 2012, he returned to Cornell as a professor in the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology section. His current research focuses on the pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae and its interactions with rice.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:11 (CET).