Dr. Bargmann received his Master’s degree in Biology at the University of Amsterdam in 2001 studying cell wall damage-signaling in yeast. Also at Amsterdam, Dr. Bargmann received his PhD in 2006 researching phospholipid signaling in plant stress responses in the lab of Dr. Teun Munnik. After his PhD, Dr. Bargmann went on to do his first post-doc at New York University looking at cell-type specific transcriptional responses in arabidopsis roots in Dr. Kenneth Birnbaum’s lab. He conducted a second post-doc working in Dr. Mark Estelle’s lab at UC San Diego as part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he worked on auxin-signaling specificity. Not only does Dr. Bargmann have a rich academic history, but he also spent several years working for Cibus – an agricultural biotech company in San Diego. He began at Cibus as a research scientist in 2014 in the Department of Cell Biology and was there until 2018, being promoted to a senior research scientist during that time. At Cibus, Dr. Bargmann lead a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engineer herbicide tolerance in cassava. In 2019, he secured an assistant professorship at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the school of Plant and Environmental Sciences. Dr. Bargmann runs his research program there currently and has ongoing projects focused on transient expression of gene-editing tools and whole-plant regeneration from protoplasts in both model and crop species.