Raymond L. Rodriguez

Dr. Rodriguez is a professor in the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology and director of the NIH-sponsored Center of Excellence in Nutritional Genomics at the University of California, Davis (http://nutrigenomics.ucdavis.edu).  After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974, he was an A.P. Giannini Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Herbert W. Boyer at UC San Francisco Medical Center.  While at UCSF, Dr. Rodriguez developed molecular cloning technologies that now serve as the foundation for the biotechnology industry. Dr. Rodriguez joined the faculty at the UC Davis in 1977 and is actively involved in research and teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level.  In 1988, Dr. Rodriguez was a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the International Center for Biotechnology at Osaka University, Japan, and in 1991, he was a Visiting Scientist with the Human Genome Project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  From 1989 to 1992, Dr. Rodriguez established the International Rice Genome Organization — a US/Japan bilateral group that helped establish the framework for sequencing the rice genome.  In 2003 he became director of the Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics, a multi-investigator, multi-institutional research program to study the impact of diet-genome interactions on human health. Dr. Rodriguez was selected as the 2008 distinguished lecturer by the USDA-ARS Beltsville Center and in 2009 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara Japan.  Dr. Rodriguez is a member of numerous scientific organizations and committees and he has been an advisor to the NIH and NSF since 1988.  He has published numerous articles and books on molecular biology and biotechnology. His 1977 paper on the construction of the cloning vector, pBR322, has been cited more than 5000 times. Dr. Rodriguez currently holds 18 U.S. patents and his latest book, Dietary Regulation of Gene Function and Its Impact on Health (W. Bidlack and R.L. Rodriguez, eds. Taylor & Francis CRC, will appear in 2011. His current research focus is nutritional epigenomics or the study of how dietary factors alter human gene activity by chromatin modification.