Michael Axtell

Michael J. Axtell is a Professor of Biology and Louis and Hedwig Sternberg Chair in Plant Biology at Pennsylvania State University's Department of Biology. His research focuses on small RNA biology in plants, including microRNA biogenesis, RNA interference mechanisms, and the role of small RNAs in plant defense and parasitic plant interactions. He leads the Axtell Lab, which integrates bioinformatics, genetics, and genomics to study small RNA functions across diverse plant species.

Education: B.A. in Biology from Ithaca College (1998), Ph.D. in Plant Biology from UC Berkeley (2003), and postdoctoral training at MIT's Whitehead Institute (2003-2006).

Key research interests include the evolutionary diversification of small RNA pathways, annotation of small RNA genes using tools like ShortStack, and the discovery of trans-species microRNAs in parasitic plants like Cuscuta campestris. His work explores how small RNAs regulate developmental programs and mediate interactions between plants and pathogens/parasites.

Awards include the Faculty Scholar Medal in Life and Health Sciences (2019) and the Masatoshi Nei Innovation Prize in Biology (2018). He contributes to collaborative projects such as PlantTransform, advancing plant genome editing using parasitic plant systems.

Major software contributions include the ShortStack toolkit for small RNA analysis and CleaveLand4 for degradome data analysis, widely used in the plant biology community.