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.