Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn. – May 6, 2019 – Calyxt, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLXT), a healthy food ingredient company, announced today that its co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Dan Voytas, Ph.D., has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his many contributions to the field of plant genomics, one of which is being an inventor of the TALEN® gene-editing technology.
Dan Voytas graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1984 and received his Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard Medical School in 1990. He completed his postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and in 1992, joined the faculty at Iowa State University. Shortly before the inception of Calyxt, Dan Voytas assumed his role as a professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development at the University of Minnesota (UMN), and now holds the position of Director of the UMN’s Center for Precision Plant Genomics. Among his other achievements, he is also an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 2009, Dr. Dan Voytas, in collaboration with Dr. Adam Bogdanove and members of their labs, developed an advanced plant breeding technology called TALEN®. Using TALEN®, it is possible to precisely target existing genes within a crop’s genome to more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively develop traits of value for consumers, including those that help improve nutrition and sustainability.
