Professor Barbara Kunkel

Barbara Kunkel grew up in Berkeley, California and earned her BS in Genetics from the University of California at Davis. Her favourite classes while an undergraduate were in genetics, bacteriology and plant biology and she became interested in plant-microbe interactions while at UC Davis.  For her graduate work Barbara studied gene regulation in Bacillus subtilis, under the guidance of Dr. Richard Losick at Harvard University.  For her postdoctoral work, Barbara joined the laboratory of Dr. Brian Staskawicz at the University of California-Berkeley, just at the time that several research groups were working to establish the interaction between the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae and Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system to study plant-microbe interactions. While in the Staskawicz lab, she focused on plant pathology and plant genetics and was part of the research team that cloned the RPS2 disease resistance gene from A. thaliana.  Barbara joined the faculty of the Biology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) in 1994. Her research program investigates the molecular bases of pathogen virulence and host susceptibility. The current focus of her research group is elucidating the roles of the plant hormone auxin during P. syringae pathogenesis. 

Barbara is on sabbatical from Washington University for the Spring 2026 term. She is joined in Cambridge by her husband, Michael Nonet, who is a professor of Neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine. Michael studies the basic mechanisms underlying development and function of the nervous system in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.  While at Cambridge he is a guest researcher in the laboratory of Professor Julie Ahringer at the Gurdon Institute.

In her free time, Barbara enjoys hiking, gardening and cooking.