About IPG
Gary Stacey appointed to head DOE committee
Gary Stacey
Gary Stacey, director of the University of Missouri Center for Sustainable Energy and professor of plant sciences at the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, was appointed chairman of the Department of Energy's Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC).
The BERAC advises the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) office of the Department of Energy on complex biological and environmental research technical issues. These issues can include developing biofuels, determining the impact of climate change, assessing options for carbon sequestration, predicting the fate and transport of subsurface contaminants, and developing new tools to explore the interface of biological and physical sciences.
The BER has an annual budget of around $700 million. It funds academic research, as well as a variety of activities at the national labs. It specifically looks into areas of environmental remediation, plant science, climate change and instrumentation. For example, three Bioenergy Research Centers that were funded a few years ago report to the BER. Among other things, BER has the major oversight responsibilities of the DOE joint genome institute.
BERAC advisory committee membership list includes representatives from Harvard Medical School, Rice University, Brandeis University, the Argonne National Laboratory, Monsanto, National Institutes of Health, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the American Geophysical Union.
Stacey also holds joint professorships in Biochemistry and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at MU. Stacey's research interests include microbe interactions in soybeans, peptide transport in plants, and soybean genomics and biotechnology. He earned his Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Texas, Austin.
Stacey was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. He earned the Distinguished Researcher Award from MU's College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources and the Chancellor's Award for Research and Creative Achievement from the University of Tennessee.