Rate My Professor Samuel Leiboff

Samuel Leiboff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology within Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences, a position he has held since 2020. He leads the Leiboff Lab, which utilizes quantitative techniques including molecular genetics, genomics, computational biology, next-generation sequencing, long-read Oxford Nanopore, chromatin structural sequencing, and image-based measurements with mathematical modeling to understand plant development. The lab works with mutant plant varieties of maize and sorghum to identify genes necessary for normal, healthy corn plants, investigating developmental programs from individual cell activity to groups of related species, with a focus on leaf and flower assembly, shape dynamics, and molecular activity. Leiboff received his BSc in Environmental Sciences, emphasis Biological Sciences, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, and PhD in Plant Biology from Cornell University’s School of Integrative Plant Science in 2017 (Morphological diversity and quantitative genetics of the maize shoot apical meristem; advisor: Michael J. Scanlon). Previously, from 2017 to 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley, supervised by Prof. Sarah Hake, studying gene regulatory mechanisms in plant morphology.