Robert Martienssen is a plant geneticist, working on transposons, genome biology, and developmental genetics of maize and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Dr. Martienssen received his B.A. in Natural Sciences (Genetics) from Cambridge University, England, in 1982, his Ph.D. from the Plant Breeding Institute and Cambridge University in 1986, and held an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley from 1986-1988. He has been on the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1989. His work at Cold Spring Harbor, leading the plant biology group, has led to the formation of a gene function database for Arabidopsis and another for maize. In addition to his full-time academic position, Dr. Martienssen is a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of Orion Genomics, an agricultural genomics company based in St. Louis, MO.