Rate My Professor Blake Wiedenheft

Blake Wiedenheft is a Biology professor and serves as Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at Montana State University. He earned his PhD in 2006 from Montana State University in the joint laboratories of Professors Mark Young and Trevor Douglas at the Thermal Biology Institute, focusing his dissertation on Sulfolobus as a model for studying thermal virology and oxidative stress. This work involved traveling to extreme environments such as Yellowstone National Park and Kamchatka, Russia, to collect samples and isolate viruses from geothermal features exceeding 80°C and pH around 3. From 2007 to 2012, he conducted postdoctoral research as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation in Jennifer A. Doudna’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, investigating the structure and function of nucleic acid-based adaptive immune systems in bacteria, including CRISPR mechanisms in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Wiedenheft joined Montana State University faculty in 2012 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease, advanced to Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 2018, and was promoted to full Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology in 2022. In 2025, he was named the university's endowed chair in plant science within the College of Agriculture.

The research in the Wiedenheft Lab elucidates mechanisms bacteria employ to defend against phage infection, viral strategies to suppress these immune systems, and develops genome editing technologies for loss- and gain-of-function studies in host-parasite interactions across humans, plants, and insects, having evolved from initial focus on CRISPR systems to broader immune pathways. His pioneering contributions to CRISPR biology are reflected in highly influential publications, including "RNA-guided genetic silencing systems in bacteria and archaea" (Wiedenheft, Sternberg, & Doudna, 2012), "CRISPR-mediated adaptive immune systems in bacteria and archaea" (Sorek, Lawrence, & Wiedenheft, 2013), "Sequence- and structure-specific RNA processing by a CRISPR endonuclease" (Haurwitz, Jinek, Wiedenheft, Zhou, & Doudna, 2010), and more recent "CRISPR-based engineering of RNA viruses" (Nemudryi et al., 2023). Wiedenheft has received major awards such as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2017), National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Career Scientist Award (2016), Amgen Young Investigator Award (2015), Montana State University Alumni Foundation Award for Excellence (2022), and Spirit of Discovery Award (2017). His scholarship has garnered over 16,000 citations and significantly advanced fields of microbial immunology, virology, and gene editing technologies.