Dr. Weslee Glenn is a senior scientist currently based at Provivi, Inc. in Santa Monica, California. Prior to his role at Provivi, his academic and professional interests have focused on (1) understanding and engineering the processes that plants use to make the natural products that we humans co-opt as medicines and (2) developing technologies to understand how plants respond to stress, which will ultimately enable the facile engineering of important food crops. His work has been funded by several national fellowship competitions including the Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, the United Negro College Fund/ Merck Post-Doctoral Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. Dr. Glenn completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he developed Bioorthogonal Non-Canonical Amino Acid Tagging (BONCAT) to study protein synthesis in plants. His post-doctoral work was recently published as a ‘Breakthrough Technology’ in the journal Plant Physiology. Prior to Caltech, Dr. Glenn earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in chemistry in 2013. While at MIT, Weslee was the recipient of many research fellowships and awards, including the MIT Institute Fellowship, the Henry Hill Research Award and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award for his work in stereotype threat and diversity training. During his Ph.D., he also completed a stent as a visiting research scholar at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England.
Dr. Glenn’s current interests include sustainable agriculture and integrated pest management. In addition to his work at Provivi, Weslee also serves on the Environmental Advisory Commission for the City of Pasadena. Weslee is also deeply involved in and committed to promoting diversity in STEM fields.