On September 1, 2011, Dr. Juan Dong began her joint appointment as a Principal Investigator at Waksman Institute and as an Assistant Professor for the Department of Plant Biology and Pathology at SEBS. Before joining Rutgers, Juan was a post-doctoral researcher in Dominique Bergmann’s laboratory in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. Juan received her Ph.D. in Plant Biology with Dr. Elizabeth Lord at the University of California at Riverside. Juan's research has focused on mechanisms of asymmetric cell division, a fundamental problem in morphogenesis, which is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape. She used a genetic approach to identify a mutant phenotype of the plant protein called BASL (Breaking of Asymmetry in the Stomatal Lineage). The corresponding gene controls asymmetric division in Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant in the mustard family.