Niklaus Grunwald


Niklaus J. Grünwald is a biologist and plant pathologist born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela of German and Swiss ancestry. He is currently a research scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, a Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University, and a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology at Cornell University.
𝕏 PhytophthoraLab

Education

Grünwald obtained a BSc in plant science at University of California, Davis in 1992. He completed his PhD in ecology and plant pathology in 1997 at UC Davis studying the effect of cover crop decomposition on soil nutrient cycling and soil microbiology. He pursued postdoctoral research at Cornell University.

Research

His academic research focuses on the evolution, genomics, and ecology of plant pathogens in the genus Phytophthora and management of the diseases they cause. This pathogen group includes some of the most costly diseases affecting crops and ecosystems. These pathogens have well characterized Effectors to circumvent plant host recognition that in the genus Phytophthora include RxLR, Crinkler and other small secreted proteins. Grünwald is best known for providing novel insights into how plant pathogens emerge, methods to study pathogen evolution, particularly when populations are clonal, and characterizing the evolutionary history of Phytophthora pathogens. In collaboration with one of his students he developed the concept of heat trees to show differential abundance of species in a tree format.

Honors and awards