Sondra Lazarowitz, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at Cornell University, a position she has held since 1998. LazarowitzÕs lab conducts research on how the interactions between viruses and their host plants lead to disease, using several model viruses and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. She uses the approaches of molecular genetics, cell biology and genomics to understand how plant viruses use the cellular trafficking machinery to spread from cell-to-cell and invade the host plant. Research in her lab defined, in molecular terms, how geminiviruses move within and between plant cells, and has led to the identification of the first nuclear export signal in a plant protein and to the discovery in plants of a class of proteins, which were thought to only be found in the animal nervous system (synaptotagmins). Lazarowitz has also been active in K-12 science outreach since 1992, having been Program Director of Howard Hughes Medical Institute programs in Undergraduate Biology and Precollege Outreach at Cornell (1999-2004) and the University of Illinois (1992-1998). Lazarowitz, together with George Keiffer and Claudia Washburn, created the Prairie Flowers Program, which has fostered systemic change in middle school science education in rural Illinois. Together with Professor Jerry Uhl at Illinois, she created BioCalc, an innovative introductory calculus course for biology majors at the University of Illinois. Her education and outreach programs have been highlighted in "Beyond Bio 101: The Transformation of Undergraduate Biology Education", the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin, and on the Discovery Channel. Dr. Lazarowitz holds a Ph.D. in virology and cell biology from The Rockefeller University, and earned a S.B. in life sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.