Martin B. Dickman, Ph.D. Join San Marino-based VG Life Sciences as Chief Science Advisor

San Marino-based VG Life Sciences, an alternative energy and agricultural biotech company, today announced that Martin B. Dickman, Ph.D., has joined its subsidiary VGEnergy, as Chief Science Advisor.

Dr. Dickman’s expertise lies in comparative plant physiology and plant pathologies, according to a news statement.

In concert with the company’s Board of Directors, he will enhance the scientific rigor of the company’s alternative energy core technology platform and expand development of a pipeline of products that enhance the lipid and sugar production in emerging market sectors, such as algal biofuels, and significantly, in more mature and much larger markets, such as corn and sugar cane.

“The overall goal of my work is understanding the mechanisms that regulate plant programmed cell death and implementing intervention or alternative strategies to generate new plants with novel mechanisms of pathogen resistance and stress tolerance,” Dickman said.

“We have recently shown that modulation of cell death can be an effective means to control certain diseases and facilitate other beneficial outcomes,” he said. “When combining our work with the ground breaking work developed by my colleague Dr. M. Karen Newell-Rogers, we are at a very exciting nexus of technologies and foresee breakthroughs in how we can manipulate plant growth with enhanced and useful traits.”

Dickman, received his B.S. degree in horticulture and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in plant pathology from the University of Hawaii. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Biological Chemistry at Washington State University, he joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska in 1987 as an assistant professor, was promoted to full professor in 1997.

He came to Texas A&M University in 2005, where he is the Director of the Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology.

“Having Dr. Dickman join us at this juncture is a significant step toward the commercialization of our VG Energy technologies,” said Haig Keledjian, VG LifeSciences’ CEO. “His field of knowledge complements Dr. Newell Rogers’ work in a way that will bring us closer to commercialization of products in agricultural sectors that are more developed and more robust than the emerging bio-fuels markets.”

For more information about VG Life Sciences Inc. go to www.VGLifeSciences.com.