Biography:

Vicki Vance is the Wade T. Batson Jr. Professor of Botany in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina, USA 29208), where she has served for over three decades. Her areas of expertise include plant molecular biology, plant virology and plant defense systems with an emphasis on small regulatory RNAs, such as short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs). Recent work in the Vance lab has focused on engineering edible plants to produce human miRNAs for therapeutic purposes.