2019 York Lecturer Kan Wang

Kan Wang

Pioneering plant biotechnologist Kan Wang will discuss crop genetic editing and its implications for sustainable agriculture when she delivers the Spring 2019 York Lecture Tuesday, Feb. 5, at Auburn University. The 4 p.m. presentation in Room 2510 of the Mell Classroom Building is co-sponsored by the College of Agriculture’s E.T. York Distinguished Lecturer Series and Auburn’s Littleton Franklin Lectures and is open to the Auburn campus and community.

In her lecture, titled “CRISPR genome editing as a modern breeding technology: How do we do it?” Wang will address the use of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR, technology instead of transgenic processes to improve disease resistance and protein levels in agricultural crops.  

Wang is a global professor of biotechnology in Iowa State University’s Department of Agronomy and co-director of Iowa State’s Crop Bioengineering Center, where she explores novel plant-genetic-transformation and gene-editing technologies and potential off-target activities of CRISPR. She holds a doctorate from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

For more about the spring lecture, contact Megan Ross at mhr0001@auburn.edu or 334-844-3201, or visit the website.