Douglas R. Cook is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a bacterial geneticist and conducted his postdoctoral research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Embryology at The Johns Hopkins University. He served in the faculty of Texas A & M University from 1992 to 2000 and as an adjunct professor of the International Graduate School in Bioinformatics and Genome Research at the Universitat Bielefeld in Germany from 2002 to 2008. He was among a small group of colleagues who pioneered the use of Medicago truncatula as a model genetic and genomic system for the investigation of legume biology. For the past two decades, he has been an advocate for the application of basic legume science towards pressing agricultural needs in the developing world, during which time his program was recognized as one of the most highly cited researchers in 2008-2018. He recently led an international consortium focused on wild relatives of cultivated chickpea. His current research spans model and crop legume systems, with a dual focus on (1) ecological genomics to understand gene function in complex natural and agricultural legume systems, and (2) mining agricultural traits from microbes and plants.