Encyclopedia of Biological Chemistry

Prof. Jez received his B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State University (1992), a Ph.D. in biochemistry & molecular biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania (1998), and was an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1998-2001). After working as a research scientist at Kosan Biosciences (2001-2002), he started his research group at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and moved to the Department of Biology at Washington University in 2008. He has authored more than 160 papers and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2005), the Phytochemical Society of North America's Arthur Neish Young Investigator Award (2007), and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award (2012) and was named as Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2014. Research in the Jez lab seeks to understand how environmental changes re-model biochemical pathways in plants at the molecular, cellular, and organism levels with the aim of engineering these systems to address agricultural and environmental problems. Current work in the lab employs a combination of structural biology, protein chemistry, and plant biology. He also launched the Biotech Explorers Program, which aims to introduce undergraduates to how teams in science can tackle real world problems using cross-disciplinary approaches.