Zachary B. Lippman (born 1978) is an American plant biologist and the Jacob Goldfield Professor of Genetics at

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, botany, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is located in Laurel Hollow, New York, in Nassau County, on ...

, a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American busin ...

Investigator and a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

Lippman has used gene editing technology to investigate the control of fruit production in various crops. In 2019 he was awarded a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and ...

and in 2020 he received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences.

Early life and education

Lippman worked on a farm in Milford, Connecticut growing up where he grew giant pumpkins. He attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, graduating in 2000. During his time as an undergraduate he worked with

Steven D. Tanksley Steven Dale Tanksley (born April 7, 1954) is the Chief Technology Officer of Nature Source Improved Plants. Prior to founding Nature Source Improved Plants, Tanksley served as the Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of plant breeding and biometry an ...

studying tomatoes. He joined the research group of

Robert A. Martienssen Robert Anthony Martienssen (born December 21, 1960) is a British plant biologist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute–Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator, and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, US. Education Robert Martien ...

where he studied the role of the DDM1 gene in methylation of transposons and how this process can alter the expression of other nearby genes. After completing his PhD in 2004, Lippman was a postdoc with Dani Zamir at

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public university, public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. ...

where he studied genes controlling branching in tomatoes. Lippman was hired as a principal investigator at Cold Spring Harbor in 2008.

Research

Lippman's research group, collaborating with Joyce Van Eck at the Boyce Thompson Institute used genome editing to improve domestication traits in the wild ground cherry, '' Physalis pruinosa''. They targeted three genes known to be important in the domestication of tomato. The first gene made plants more compact and caused them to produce fruit in clusters rather than individually. The second gene increased the number of fruit produced per unit of stem. The final of the three genes increased the size of the fruit by increasing the number of seed compartments inside of each fruit.

Awards

Investigator (2018) *

, commonly referred to as a "Genius grant" (2019). *

, Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences (2020).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lippman, Zachary 1978 births American geneticists American botanists Cornell University alumni Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Living people MacArthur Fellows Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences