Rate My Professor Steven Whitham

Steven Whitham is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, Entomology and Microbiology at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. He received a B.S. in Agricultural Biochemistry from Iowa State University in 1990, an M.S. in Plant Pathology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from UC Berkeley in 1995. Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley's USDA-ARS Plant Gene Expression Center and then at Washington State University and Texas A&M University under Dr. James C. Carrington from 1996 to 1999. He served as a Staff Scientist at Torrey Mesa Research Institute from 1999 to 2000 before joining Iowa State University as an Assistant Professor in 2000, advancing to Associate Professor in 2007 and Professor in 2012. Additional appointments include Director of the Center for Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses from 2013 to 2019, Faculty Scholar in the Plant Sciences Institute since 2015, and Co-Director of the Crop Bioengineering Center since 2018 and the Iowa Soybean Research Center.

Whitham's research specializes in molecular plant pathology, focusing on plant-virus and plant-fungus interactions, particularly in soybean and corn. Pioneering work includes cloning the N gene from tobacco that confers resistance to tobacco mosaic virus (Whitham et al., Cell, 1994) and developing virus-based genetic screens in Arabidopsis that identified RTM genes restricting virus movement (Whitham et al., PNAS, 1999). At Iowa State, he has developed virus-induced gene silencing and gene editing vectors for crop plants, including studies on soybean rust interactions. Notable publications include "Molecular soybean–pathogen interactions" (Whitham et al., Annual Review of Phytopathology, 2016) and "CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing using egg cell-specific promoters in Arabidopsis and soybean" (Zheng et al., Frontiers in Plant Science, 2020). His scholarship has an h-index of 58 and over 13,800 citations. Awards include Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society (2022), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2016), ISU Regents Award for Faculty Excellence (2021), and ISU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Mid-Career Outstanding Achievement in Research (2009). He teaches plant-microbe interactions, molecular plant pathology, and virology, and serves as Editor for PhytoFrontiers and Review Editor for Frontiers in Plant Science.