Welcome to the Plant Pathology web page!
The University of Florida is a great place to study and pursue a career in Plant Pathology. As one who has been here for more than three decades, I can assure you that it is truly an enjoyable and rewarding institution. We have a world renowned faculty, a dynamic university and college, exciting academic surroundings for intellectual pursuits, and a comfortable community in which to live. We deal with an incredible diversity of crops and diseases and a vibrant statewide agricultural industry that serves local, national and international markets. The department is a national and international leader in numerous areas of plant pathology including diseases caused by fastidious microorganisms, bacterial diseases of citrus, vegetables and ornamentals, whitefly- and aphid-transmitted viruses, the myriad fungal diseases that affect crops, mycology, epidemiology, molecular biology of host-parasite interactions, and post-harvest diseases. The department has a prominent program in biological control of weeds using plant pathogens, and a highly regarded teaching program in undergraduate, graduate, and distance education. Together these features provide for a great place to work, learn, and build scientific professional careers. Our faculty is also very active in international programs.
Our department, founded nearly 60 years ago, is part of the University of Florida, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS; http://cals.ifas.ufl.edu/) and the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS; http://www.ifas.ufl.edu/). The department has 14 Gainesville-based faculty, 24 faculty located at Research and Education Centers (at nine different locations ranging from subtropical to temperate agroecosystems), 14 adjunct, courtesy and/or affiliate faculty, and 24 on-campus staff positions in teaching (http://cals.ifas.ufl.edu/), research (http://research.ifas.ufl.edu/), and extension (http://extension.ifas.ufl.edu/). Our department is host to the Plant Medicine program that offers the Doctor of Plant Medicine degree (http://dpm.ifas.ufl.edu/). Our faculty members also serve in the interdisciplinary Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology program (http://pmcb.ifas.ufl.edu/) that involves several departments of the CALS, Health Science Center and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Plant Pathology Department also has a research position on Astrobiology at NASA to study microorganisms under extreme environments such as the Martian environment.
Our's is the lead institution for The Southern Plant Diagnostic Network (http://spdn.ifas.ufl.edu/), one of five regions in the National Plant Diagnostic Network, and the chair of the national subcommittee for Training and Education. The Department is also a leading partner in the University of Florida’s new Emerging Pathogens Initiative (http://epi.ufl.edu/) that was recently funded by the State of Florida. Because of the sentinel nature of Florida, statewide faculty have been heavily involved in programs to deal with outbreaks of recently arrived disease threats such as the soybean rust, sudden oak death and citrus greening.
To prospective students, postdoctoral scientists and visiting scholars our department offers unprecedented opportunities to work with a wide variety of crops, plant diseases of national and international implications, and research fields that are on the cutting edge of plant pathology. In the recent past, we have had students, postdoctorates and visiting professors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Egypt, Ghana, Hungary, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Oman, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Surinam, Turkey, and Venezuela. The University of Florida also has an unusually active undergraduate program, with about 18 students currently majoring in Plant Pathology.
As the Chair of the Plant Pathology Department, I invite you to examine our web page and learn more about us.
Raghavan “Charu” Charudattan
Professor and Department Chair
Plant Pathology Department