Molecular Biologist, Botanist, and Microbiologist based in New York City

Morgan is a Molecular Biologist, Botanist, and Microbiologist based in New York City. He majored in English Literature at the University of Missouri, focusing on Shakespeare and the Lake Poets during a semester abroad in Lancashire, England. He returned to the US to write his capstone paper on sci-fi adaptation into film (When “Loosely Based On” Becomes “New”: Defining the Limits of Adaptation in the Film Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). As an undergrad, his interest in plants brought him to Dr. Walter Gassmann’s lab where he joined a project investigating the plant immune system. He continued his graduate education there, completing his PhD in 2017. He then received a prestigious Korea Research Fellowship from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) to continue his plant research at POSTECH in Pohang, South Korea. A family tragedy brought him to Los Angeles in early 2019 where he joined UC Riverside as a postdoc decoding the devastating citrus greening disease. In New York, he has been involved in the private sector (Aanika Biosciences, a start-up in Brooklyn), the non-profit sector (Biotech Without Borders), and the public sector (the National Park Service). He has published in several prestigious journals including Science, PLOS Pathogens, and the Annual Review of Plant Biology.