C. Neal Stewart, Jr., PhD, is the Ivan Racheff Chaired Professor of Plant Molecular Genetics in the Dept. of Plant Sciences at the Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville (Email: nealstewart@utk.edu). He is also the co-director of the Tennessee Plant Research Center. He obtained BS degrees from North Carolina State Univ., and MS and PhD degrees from Virginia Tech, and then held a postdoc position at the Univ. of Georgia. Research in the Stewart lab revolves around synergistic topics such as engineering systems for plant biotechnology and synthetic biology, understanding and mitigating risks of such systems and plants, and characterizing the performance of transgenic plants in the environment. The ultimate goal of the research is to simultaneously improve agricultural production, sustainability, and the environment.