Sandra Anagnostakis

Department of Plant Pathology and Ecology,
The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station

Chestnuts in this Century

Sandra Anagnostakis has been working on chestnut blight disease since 1968. After completing basic studies with the fungus she imported virus-containing strains of the fungus from France (1972) and demonstrated that they could be used in the U.S. for biological control of chestnut blight. She took over the chestnut breeding program for The Experiment Station in 1983, and has expanded the program to include molecular methods of selecting better trees.

She has worked on the genetics of various fungi, including those that cause corn smut disease, Dutch elm disease, Nectria canker of birch, and chestnut blight. Other work included methods for detection of extracellular enzymes produced by fungi, production of haploids of higher plants using anther culture techniques, and breeding of chestnut trees.

Anagnostakis holds a B.A. in Biology from the University of California at Riverside, an M.A. in Botany from the University of Texas at Austin and an Agr.D. Justus in Plant Pathology from Liebig Universitaet, Germany.

LUNCH PROVIDED