Stephen H. Howell, vice president for research at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Inc. (BTI), on the campus of Cornell University, has assumed the position of editor-in-chief of Plant Molecular Biology, an international journal of plant molecular biology, biochemistry and genetic engineering.

The journal is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in cooperation with the International Society of Plant Molecular Biology, the largest organization of plant molecular biologists.

Howell, the Boyce Schulze Downey Scientist at BTI and an adjunct professor of plant biology at Cornell, is the author ofMolecular Genetics of Plant Development, an upper-division undergraduate- or graduate-level textbook published by Cambridge University Press. The book is also a reference for scientists in the field of plant molecular biology and plant molecular genetics, presenting classical plant development in modern, molecular genetic terms, and providing a framework for integrating gene discovery and genome analysis into the context of plant development.

Before coming to BTI in 1988, Howell was a professor of biology at the University of California at San Diego and a visiting scientist at the Australian government Division of Plant Industry, Canberra.

Howell earned his bachelor's degree at Grinnell College in 1963 and was awarded his doctorate in 1967 by Johns Hopkins University, where he was named Phi Beta Kappa. In 1976, he earned a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and in 1997, a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship.