Prof. Detlef Weigel, a German American scientist, is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen, which he joined in 2002 after almost 10 years on the faculty of the Salk Institute. He is among the ten most highly cited plant biologists in the world, and the work of his lab has been recognized by his election to learned societies, including the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, as well as scientific awards, most recently the Stephen Hales Award of the American Society of Plant Biologists and the Novozymes Prize of the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

The first major finding from his lab was that an Arabidopsis gene could dramatically accelerate flowering of trees; this established a proof of concept for Arabidopsis genetics as a platform for biotechnological discoveries. His group later discovered the first plant microRNA mutant and identified the factor now known to be the long sought-after mobile flower-inducing signal. Detlef was one of the first to exploit natural genetic variation for understanding how the environment affects plant development, and he pioneered the application of next-generation sequencing technologies for describing and understanding genomic variation, including from herbarium samples. Today, this work incorporates questions at the interface of evolution and ecology: How can wild plants adapt to climate change, and how do they manage to keep their pathogens at bay? To support this work, he and his collaborators initiated over a decade ago the ‘1001 Genomes Project’ for Arabidopsis.

Detlef has served on many editorial and advisory boards, including HHMI’s Medical Advisory Board. He is a forceful advocate of open access publishing and helped to found the transformational journal eLife. He is also a co-founder of three biotech startups.