Rob Denell is Professor and Associate Director for Extramural Activities in the Division of Biology of KansasState University, located in Manhattan, Kansas.
Dr. Denell has worked for many years in the area of insect developmental genetics. After a long-term focus on Drosophila homeotic genes, he has turned to the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, because of its potential as an insect model system with many of the same advantages of Drosophila. Along with Dick Beeman , Sue Brown, and other colleagues, he is working to improve the technical repertoire of Triboloum as a system, as well as studying the beetle homologs of homeotic and segmentation genes originally identified in flies. This work is currently funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Denell is also serving as PI and Director of a project funded by the NSF EPSCoR program and entitled Evolutionary Conservation of the Molecular Mechanisms of Development.