Jeffrey Bennetzen

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Jeffrey Lynn Bennetzen is an American geneticist on the faculty of the University of Georgia (UGA).

He received his bachelor's degree in biology from the University of California, San Diego in 1974 and his doctoral degree in biochemistry from the University of Washington in 1980. After earning his Ph.D., he served as a postdoctoral fellow from 1980 through 1981 at Washington University, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. From 1981 to 1983 he was a research scientist at the International Plant Research Institute.

In 1983, Bennetzen became an Assistant Professor at Purdue University and eventually became a full Professor in 1991 and H. Edwin Umbarger Distinguished Professor of Genetics in 1999. After two decades at Purdue, he joined the faculty at UGA in 2003 as a Professor of Genetics and Norman Giles Eminent Scholar Chair in Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics. He is also a member of UGA's interdisciplinary Institute of Bioinformatics.

Bennetzen's research interests include plant genome structure/evolution and gene function relationships, genetic diversity in under-utilized crops of the developing world, rapid evolution of complex disease resistance loci in plants, fine structure recombinational analysis, and the coevolution of plant/microbe and plant/parasite interactions.