Nick Carpita Elected Secretary

Nick Carpita

Nick Carpita became ASPB secretary on October 1 and will serve for the next two years. The secretary is also chair of the Program Committee.

Carpita is on the faculty of the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University. He grew up near Clearwater, Florida, where he became interested in plants his first year in high school. He got his degree in biological sciences at Purdue University in 1972 and a Ph.D. in plant physiology at Colorado State University in 1977. His postdoctoral work from 1977 to 1979 with Dr. Deborah Delmer at Michigan State University– Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory kindled his interest in the biology of the plant cell wall. He returned to Purdue University in 1979 as an assistant professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, where he matriculated through the ranks to professor in 1989. He was a visiting professor in the Plant Biology Institute in Zürich, Switzerland, 1986–1987, and returned as a guest professor for the summer of 1994, teaching a course on plant development. He also was named guest professor at the Botanical Institute of São Paulo, Brazil, in spring 1998, where he presented a course on cell wall carbohydrate chemistry.

Carpita’s research interest is the structure and function of the plant cell wall. He studies the unique cell wall of cereals and related species and conducts research on the synthesis of cell wall polysaccharides in vitro. He heads a team of plant biologists at five institutions who use Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy as a high-throughput method to recognize genetic mutations in maize and Arabidopsis that cause defects in cell wall composition. This program hopes to define biological functions for many of the 2,500 genes expected to be involved in wall biogenesis and disassembly.

Carpita teaches an undergraduate course called “Plants and Civilization” that traces the history of agriculture and the broad impacts plants have on human civilization. He teaches a graduate course on plant carbohydrate chemistry and various methods courses and research workshops for undergraduate honors students. He has served on several competitive grants panels, including those of the USDA–NRI and DOE’s Energy Biosciences, and was a panel member and panel head for BARD’s Cell and Molecular Biology section from 1993 to 1998. He was the coordinator of “Cytonet,” a research group studying the cytoskeleton– plasma membrane–cell wall continuum, conducting several workshops that fostered research in this area. In 2003, he served as vice chair for the Gordon Research Conference on Cell Walls and will serve as chair for the 2006 conference. He was also named to the International Advisory Board for the Tenth International Cell Wall Meeting held in 2004. He was recently named to ISI’s “highly cited author” (http://isihighlycited.com) list for Plant & Animal Sciences. One of his articles published in The Plant Journal (Plant J. 3[1]: 1–30, Jan 1993] is ranked the highest cited paper ever in Plant & Animal Sciences with currently over 1,000 citations (go to http://incites.com/papers/NicholasCarpita.html to read his interview).

Nick Carpita has been a member of ASPB since 1975. He served on the editorial board of Plant Physiology from 1987 to 1992 and was monitoring editor from 1998 to 2001. From 1996 to 2000, he served on the editorial board of Planta and since 2003 has been a corresponding member of the editorial board of the Brazilian Journal of Plant Physiology. In 2002, he was elected to the Executive Committee of ASPB.