Richard Meagher is a Professor of Genetics at the University of Georgia, where he has been teaching and performing research since 1976. He received his B.S. with Honors in Biology from the University of Illinois in 1969. He received his Master in Biology and Bacterial Physiology in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Biology and Enzymology in 1973 from Yale University working on the degradation of toxic aromatic compounds with Dr. L. Nicholas Ornston. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow on detecting carcinogens as mutagens with Dr. Bruce Ames in 1973-1974. In 1974, during his postdoctoral research with Drs. Herbert Boyer and Howard Goodman at UC San Francisco, he was the first to clone and express plant DNA in bacteria. Earlier in his career at UGA, Dr. Meagher served as Head of the Genetics Department (1996 –1998). He co-founded the University’s Molecular Genetics Instrumentation Facility (MGIF, 1985) and the Biological Scientists Computation Resource (1986, currently RCR: Research Computing Resource), one of the first computing networks in the world to analyze DNA, RNA, and protein. MGIF and RCR now serve over 200 laboratories nationwide. Dr. Meagher has worked in the field of bacterial and plant molecular genetics through most of his career with research focused on the cytoskeleton, molecular evolution of gene families, RNA processing, and environmental remediation. Dr. Meagher has published more than 100 peer reviewed research articles in various scientific journals including Biochemistry, Cell, Genetics, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Plant Cell, Plant Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., J. Virology, and Virology.

Email address: pinson@arches.uga.edu