Dan graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1984 and received his Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard Medical School in 1990. He is a co-founder of Calyxt and one of the inventors of the TALEN® technology. In addition to his role at Calyxt, Voytas is a professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development at the University of Minnesota (UMN), which he joined in 2008, and is Director of the UMN’s Center for Precision Plant Genomics. In 1992, Voytas joined the faculty at Iowa State University. Prior to this, he conducted postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dan is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences.