DECODING THE CHEMICAL LANGUAGE OF PLANTS

Plants are nature's master chemists, harboring a vast and largely unexplored world of specialized metabolites with immense potential for medicine, materials, and climate solutions. Unlike animals, plants can't run from danger - instead, they've evolved sophisticated chemical defenses and communication systems over hundreds of millions of years as essential adaptations contributing to their success in terrestrial environments. Recent technological breakthroughs in genomics, metabolomics, and synthetic biology are now enabling us to decode these chemical 'languages' of plants with unprecedented efficiency and depth. In this talk, Dr. Weng will share the latest research on unraveling fascinating plant metabolic systems and discuss how this fundamental knowledge could lead to the discovery of new drugs, inspire novel industrial processes, and provide sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based products. By learning to 'speak' the chemical languages of plants, we are unlocking a treasure trove of solutions to some of society's greatest challenges.

Dr. Jing-Ke Weng is the Inaugural Director of the Institute for Plant-Human Interface, a Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Bioengineering, and an Affiliated Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern, he was a member of the Whitehead Institute, and was an Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor of Biology at MIT (2013-2023). He received his B.S. (2003) in Biotechnology from Zhejiang University, and his Ph.D. (2009) in Biochemistry, from Purdue University. He was a Pioneer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2009-2013). Dr. Weng has won numerous awards in his career, including the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2016), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2016), Searle Scholar (2015), Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences (2014), American Society of Plant Biologists Early Career Award (2014), and Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science (2013). Dr. Weng has also served as a co-founder or scientific advisor for multiple biotech companies.