Women in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Biotechnology

Laura Privalle has worked in the agricultural biotechnology industry since 1984 after receiving her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin. Her dissertation was on nitrogen fixation in blue-green algae. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University where she worked on nitrite reductase, she joined CIBA-GEIGY's brand new biotechnology unit. This subsequently became Novartis and then Syngenta. She has been working in Regulatory Science since 1992 and was deeply involved in producing the safety assessment package for the first transgenic maize product that received regulatory approval in the United States. In 2003 she joined BASF as head of Regulatory Science where she remained until 2013 when she joined Bayer CropScience. She has served as vice-chair and then chair of the Protein Allergenicity Technical Committee for the Health and Environmental Science Institute. She also serves on the Education Enhancement Grants panel for the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. Inaddition, she is a member of the Faculty of 1000 in the Agriculture and Biotechnology Section.