Robert L. Last is Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Plant Biology at Michigan State University. He has been at Michigan State since 2004; before that time he was a Program Officer in Bio at NSF, Director of a functional genomics group at Cereon Genomics and Monsanto Co., and Professor of Plant Genetics at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell. His laboratory uses functional genomics approaches to understand the synthesis of small molecules of nutritional importance to animals and of adaptive significance to plants.