Wolfgang Busch is a 2025 NOMIS Awardee, Hess Chair in Plant Science, professor and director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, US. He is leading the project Mapping the Root Perceptome: Decoding the Chemical Universe Roots Can Sense and the Mechanisms Behind It.
A native of Germany, Busch studied biology at the University of Tübingen, where he earned his undergraduate degree. He completed his PhD in biology at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 2009. During his studies, he also conducted research at the University of California, San Diego, US. Busch then pursued postdoctoral research at Duke University in Durham, US. In 2011 he established his own research group at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna before joining the Salk Institute as associate professor in 2017. He was promoted to full professor in 2020, appointed Hess Chair in Plant Science in 2021 and has been director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory at Salk since 2024.
Research Focus
Wolfgang Busch is a leading plant biologist whose research explores the genetic and molecular mechanisms that govern root growth and development, and how plants respond to their environment. His work focuses on traits that enhance resilience and enable long-term carbon storage in soils.
Busch pioneered novel methods to evaluate hundreds of thousands of roots by combining advanced imaging and machine vision algorithms to automatically extract data on root length and shape. He also discovered how plants reprogram their cellular activities to withhold iron when bacteria invade root tissues, and he elucidated the molecular mechanisms that link the iron deficiency signaling pathway to the plant immune response. Further, Busch identified a key gene and its variants that can switch shallow root systems to deep root systems, and he described the underlying molecular mechanisms driving this transformation. Busch’s insights have revealed new avenues for engineering plant resilience and disease resistance.
He is a cofounder and leader of Salk’s Harnessing Plants Initiative, an innovative program developing crop varieties with enhanced carbon removal capabilities. He is also cofounder of an agritech company focused on advancing agricultural solutions for carbon sequestration.
Bridging fundamental biological discovery and applied innovation, Busch’s work aims to deepen our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that underlie the evolutionary success and environmental resilience of plants, as well as to advance sustainable agriculture, climate change mitigation and global food security.
Awards and Recognition
Busch has been recognized with several awards, including the Society for Experimental Biology President’s Medal (2015), the Annals of Botany Lecture at the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (2014), and the Genome Web Young Investigator, Genomeweb Intelligence Network (2013).
Feature images: Photos by Salk Institute