Samuel Leiboff

Samuel Leiboff is an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University's Department of Botany and Plant Pathology within the College of Agricultural Sciences. His lab focuses on quantitative approaches to understand plant development, particularly in maize and sorghum. Key areas include leaf and flower assembly, dynamic molecular changes during development, and the integration of computational biology with genetic analysis.

Education:

• BSc in Environmental Sciences, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
• PhD in Integrative Plant Sciences (Plant Biology), Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)

Research Interests: The lab employs comparative transcriptomics, quantitative genetics, and image processing to study plant development. Current projects involve analyzing hormone dynamics in cereal crops, stem cell regulation in Arabidopsis, and developing computational tools for morphometric analysis. Techniques include live imaging of protoplasts and high-resolution gene expression atlases.

Teaching:

• Fall: BOT 599 - Special Topics in Plant Molecular Development
• Winter: BI 311 - Genetics
• Spring: BDS 411 - Case Studies in Biological Data Sciences

Lab Activities: The Leiboff Lab actively collaborates on projects like the Plant Cell Atlas initiative and has developed tools for RNAseq analysis. Current lab members include students Diana Ruggiero and Nicholas Francis, along with postdoctoral researcher Maria Camila Medina Montes.