Debora Wilk Email & Phone Number

*Senior research scientist with extensive experience in the discovery and development of biologicals for the field of Agriculture. Extensive experience in the fields of Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Plant Pathology, Plant Physiology, and Plant Biology. *Experience conducting both independent and collaborative research projects, including design and execution of experiments, data analysis, interpretation, documentation and presentation of results. *Demonstrated collaboration development successes.*Extensive experience leading, managing and developing direct reports and team.*Project management experience and excellent organizational and planning skills •Extensive experience in assay development; Bio-assays for Biocontrol (Nematicides, Fungicides), Plant growth promotion, Pathogenicity assays, Enzymatic assays.•Expertise in standard molecular biology techniques including OMICs, PCR, RT-PCR and qRT-PCR.•RNA/DNA/cDNA/siRNA purification, sample preparation and detection methods. •Extensive experience in gene discovery, cloning and vector construction. •Construction of vectors for plant, fungal and bacterial transformation. Vectors for gene-silencing, gene-knockout and tagged fusions in fungi and plants.•Construction and screening of cDNA/2-hybrid libraries. •Study and characterization of genes their expression patterns and regulation.•Fungal and Yeast transformation using Spheroplasting.•Experimental proficiency in strain characterization using molecular methods.•Plant transformation using Agrobacterium.•Transient plant transformation using Biolistics. •Analysis of Arabidopsis mutants and T-DNA insertion lines.•Promoter analysis and characterization.•Proteomics: sample preparation for MALDI-TOF and LC-MS/MS analysis; cell fractionation.•Bioinformatic tools for genomics and proteomics: Scaffold, X!Tandem, Blast2Go, etc.•Expression and isolation of recombinant proteins and verification of enzymatic activity.•Verification of protein interactions at the biochemical level.Specialties: •Proven track record in development of scientific methods, research plans, statistical analysis and technical communication. •Well developed management, organizational and communication skills as evidenced by supervising experience, conference presentations, peer-reviewed journal publications and the development and management of collaborations.•Fluent in English, Spanish and Hebrew.

Listed skills include Molecular Biology, Pcr, Biochemistry, Microbiology, and 23 others.