Claude W. dePamphilis received the PhD degree from the University of Georgia. He was a US National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellow in plant biology with Jeff Palmer at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, and is now professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University. He is a plant evolutionary biologist with broad interests in processes and patterns of evolution at both the molecular and organismal levels. His research focuses on three project areas—the evolution of the flower and the floral developmental program, the study of parasitic plants, and chloroplast genome and phylogenomic evolution. He is the PI of the Floral Genome and Ancestral Angiosperm Genome projects, and co-PI,of the Parasitic Plant Genome Project and the Monocot ATOL.