Dr. Can Baysal is a Plant Molecular Biologist who earned his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Food Science and Technology from the University of Lleida, Spain. His doctoral research focused on targeted genome editing and the engineering of biological nitrogen fixation in cereals, with his work becoming the first to express active nitrogenase components in rice mitochondria. Dr. Baysal then joined the University of Minnesota as a postdoctoral researcher and later as a staff scientist, where he developed and deployed plant RNA viruses for genome engineering in both monocot and dicot species. During this time, he also served as a researcher within the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), working to overcome transformation bottlenecks in genome editing for bioenergy crops. Notably, his research was the first to demonstrate the potential of plant RNA viruses as robust tools for in planta genome editing in sorghum. Dr. Baysal is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) Crop Transformation Center (CTC), where he leads the Plant Genome Engineering Team (PGE).