Hong-gu Kang

Associate Professor, Biology, Texas State University 

Dr. Hong-Gu Kang is an Associate Professor of Biology at Texas State University. Hong-Gu received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Agricultural Chemistry from Seoul National University, and his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology from UCLA. He carried out his post-doctoral research under Dr. Dan Klessig at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. He is interested in learning stress-associated molecular changes and their long-lasting impact. His long-term research mission is to improve the production of crop plants via optimizing environmental stress responses. He was trained as a molecular biologist in his doctoral research on transcription regulation. During his doctoral training, he identified a group of stress-associated protein regulators. He then further expanded his research interest into more application-oriented research during his post-doctoral training and performed a genetic screening for a plant defense regulator. This screen identified one of the most studied epigenetic regulators in biotic stress, MORC1. This finding provided important insight that an epigenetic component(s) plays an important role in the regulation and evolution of stress-associated responses/traits. Furthermore, his research program found that transposable elements are a critical mediator between stress and epigenetic responses. His NSF-supported program at Texas State is currently working to reveal the molecular mechanism of how transposable elements contribute to stress responses and how their movements influence the development of stress-associated traits. He has received numerous awards, including the NSF-CAREER award and the Korean Education Ministry Scholarship Award. Hong-Gu is currently teaching Cell Biology and Bioinformatics and has been an active member of KSEA since 2012.