Jeffery Dangl

Jeffery L. Dangl (b. Oct 13, 1957) is a U.S. biologist. He is currently John N. Couch Professor of Biology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Dangl earned his BAS of Biological Sciences and Modern Literature, MS of Biological Sciences, and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He joined the UNC-CH faculty after a postdoctoral period at the Department of Biochemistry, Max-Planck-Institüt für Züchtungsforschung in Köln, Germany and as a Group Leader in the Max-Delbrück Laboratorium of the same institute.

Dr. Dangl was an immunologist prior to pioneering Arabidopsis as a model system to study plant disease resistance. Dr. Dangl is well known for his contributions on the genetic and molecular basis of plant disease susceptibility and resistance. He, along with collaborator, Jonathan D. G. Jones, proposed the “Guard Hypothesis” [1] which provides a testable explanation of how a plant cell overcomes the large number of arms used by pathogens to evoke disease while having only a limited set of plant proteins to defend itself.

Dr. Dangl is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2007), the Deutsche Academie der Naturforscher , The Leopoldina (2003), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004).

He is a member of the editorial board of eight leading journals in genetics, genomics, and cell biology, he has served on several scientific advisory boards for companies, and he served administrative roles in several national and international societies relating to plant biology research.