Chris R. Somerville

Christopher Roland Somerville is a Canadian-American biologist known as a pioneer of Arabidopsis thaliana research. Somerville is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a Program Officer at the Open Philanthropy Project.

Life and career
Somerville majored in Mathematics and completed a PhD in Genetics at the University of Alberta, and then did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of William Ogren before serving as a faculty member at U. Alberta and Michigan State University. He directed the Department of Plant Science at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University and then the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 2017.

Somerville was co-founder and Executive Chairman of Mendel Biotechnology, Inc. and a co-founder of Poetic Genetics, LS9, Inc, and Redleaf Biologics. Somerville has contributed to societal debates on the value of transgenic crops and biofuels.

Together with Elliot Meyerowitz, Somerville was awarded the Balzan Prize in 2006 for his work developing the small mustard plant A. thaliana as a model. His interest in this plant was partly stimulated by a review article written by George Rédei.

Many trainees from Somerville's lab have started independent labs, including Mark Estelle, Peter McCourt, George W. Haughn, John W. Schiefelbein, Christoph Benning, Clint Chapple, Wolf-Dieter Reiter, John Browse, Sean Cutler, Dominique Bergmann, Seung Y. Rhee, Staffan Persson, Wolfgang Lukowitz, and C. Stewart Gillmor.

Research highlights

 * Pioneered ‘biochemical genetics’ approach to problems in plant metabolism, including photorespiration, lipid metabolism, and cellulose synthesis.
 * First map-based cloning of an A. thaliana gene


 * Lead development of The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) database and web resource