Farhad ‘Fred’ Moshiri grew up in Iran and moved to the US shortly before the Islamic Revolution, not knowing what was to become of Iran. Fred spent his formative years as a college and Ph.D. student and post-doc working in the lab of his freshman advisor in the Department of Biology of Johns Hopkins University.
With his training as a molecular microbiologist and more than 25 years of experience in two successful Ag Biotech companies, Fred has always been fascinated with microbial diversity and how bacteria and bacterial genes have been the prime force in the evolution of the modern Ag Biotech industry.
As a Science Fellow at Monsanto, he served as an expert in the design and construction of complex plant and bacterial transformation vectors. He contributed to the discovery and structure determination of novel insecticidal proteins and methods to differentiate their modes of action and using bacterial expression systems to characterize herbicide tolerance genes, genes for plant metabolic engineering and CRISPR proteins for genome editing.
Fred lives with his wife Cheryl and their cats in Chesterfield, MO. In his free time, he likes reading, watching movies, and enjoying the company of friends and family.