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Erin Zess is a Senior Scientific Manager at Benson Hill since October 2021, following a position as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Carnegie Institution, where research focused on engineering polygenic traits in Arabidopsis thaliana. Prior to these roles, Erin Zess was a Scientist at Benson Hill and completed a Doctoral Degree at The Sainsbury Laboratory, investigating the specialization of autophagy-related protein 8 isoforms in Solanaceae and the evolutionary dynamics of virulence proteins in Phytophthora. Erin Zess gained experience as a Research Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developing synthetic biology tools for cyanobacteria, and as an Agronomic Traits Gene Discovery Intern at Monsanto Company, mining microbial diversity for novel insecticidal proteins. Educationally, Erin Zess holds a PhD in Plant Pathology from the University of East Anglia and dual Bachelor's degrees in Microbiology and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.