MPS History
A Brief History of the Molecular Plant Sciences Program at MSU
Christoph Benning, East Lansing, May 2026
For many years during its 60-year existence, the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) had been one of the leading promoters of graduate education in Molecular Plant Sciences (MPS) at Michigan State University (MSU) supported through its Department of Energy-Bioenergy Sciences (DOE-BES) grant. PRL graduate students were recruited directly into the PRL and then joined graduate degree granting programs at MSU such as the Genetics or Cell and Molecular Biology programs. I was a PRL student in the eighties and received my degree from the Genetics program. While I was a young faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, PRL students could join the labs of non-PRL faculty at MSU with the first two years of their fellowship covered by the PRL DOE grant. Thus, many of us outside the PRL greatly benefited from this PRL outreach, including myself. This support of graduate students from the PRL DOE grant was no longer sustainable after 2012 when the DOE asked the PRL to realign its priorities with the programmatic goals of DOE-BES. At the same time, it was apparent that many labs beyond the PRL were practicing state-of-the-art molecular plant science at MSU. However, students and faculty working at MSU in molecular plant sciences had no longer a common representation or organization, and were not visible to the outside, even though MSU remains even today among the leaders in the field by any measure: funding, number of National Academy of Sciences members, alumni success etc. Hence many of the faculty at MSU across many departments and colleges saw the need for a graduate program at MSU focused on molecular plant science.
Fast forwarding to August of 2015, when I was recruited to become the next PRL Director, I asked for mandate and resources to start a graduate program in Molecular Plant Sciences at MSU. I received this mandate from the Dean of CNS, James Kirkpatrick, and half of a position each for a communication manager and a graduate program administrator for the MPS program. In the Fall of 2015, I formed a representative MPS Exploratory Committee comprised of Brad Day, Dean DellaPenna, Rebecca Grumet, Kathy Osteryoung, Jonathan Walton, and myself as the chair. Over the course of the next two years, this group met regularly to discuss the program, got it accepted and approved by faculty, units, colleges and the MSU administration. The MPS program was rolled out in the fall of 2018, with Jonathan Walton as the initial MPS Interim Director nominated by the MPS Exploratory Committee, who was also a key author of the MPS handbook. Following the untimely death of Jonathan Walton, the first elected MPS Director was Brad Day.
At the core of the formal MPS Program Curriculum is an expectation that the students will develop a comprehensive, integrative understanding of the molecular processes underlying plant energy status, metabolism, growth, development, gene regulation and evolution, plant stress tolerance, and plant interaction with the environment. Towards this end, the students take MPS Program-required course work in Plant Molecular and Omics Biology (PLB/BMB 856) and a newly developed course in Molecular Plant Physiology (BMB866/PLB866) coupled with elective classes appropriate to the dual major and educational objectives of each student and dissertation research. During the development of the dual-major MPS Program, extensive negations led to agreements between MPS and the relevant degree granting programs to not overburden the students with course work required by MPS and the respective degree-granting program of the dual major.
My thanks go out to all members of the MPS Exploratory Committee, who spent enormous time to get the program off the ground. A special shoutout goes to Rich Schwartz, the CNS Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, and Thomas Jeitchko, the Dean of the Graduate School, who helped me navigate the budgetary and administrative hurdles of starting a new graduate program from scratch. Of course, there is more than I can over in brief here. Feel free to explore the attached original documents and slides highlighting key events during the development of the dual-major MPS Graduate Program.
As a side note, during the process of developing the MPS Graduate Program and as an outreach activity of the PRL to include the entire MPS community at MSU, the PRL seminar series evolved into the MPS seminar series, fully supported by the PRL during the first five years of the existence of the MPS program. The MPS program and the MPS seminar series now have their own budget and are fully handled by the MPS program, its current, second elected Director, Jianping Hu, and faculty committees.
Historic MPS Program Development Documents
1. Minutes from the first MPS Executive Committee meeting, September 2015
2. Update on MPS program development, December 2015
3. Rollout Memo to the CNS Dean and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, January 2017
4. Timeline for the roll out of the MPS Program, January 2017
5. Proposal document sent out for final approval, March 2017