Judit Monis, Ph.D., Manager of STA Plant Health Services

Judit brings over 15 years of plant diagnostics and disease eradication experience with in-depth skills in virology, immunology, pathogen diagnostics, tissue culture, disease resistance screens, transgenic plant analyses, recombinant DNA methodology and protein analyses. As head of the STA Plant Health Services business unit, Judit will be expanding services, offering all-inclusive diagnostic testing services to agriculture, especially to the viticulture, fruit, vegetable and ornamental industry.

Judit was previously a Supervisory Plant Pathologist-Virologist at the USDA Center for Plant Health Science and Technology. While there, she developed and optimized diagnostic methods for pathogens of quarantine importance. She was also the European Pathology Manager for Seminis Vegetable Seeds. There, she managed research and scientific programs related to vegetable disease resistance discovery in France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands. Judit began her career as a Senior Scientist at Agritope, Inc., where she directed the plant pathology group and established a state-of-the-art grapevine disease testing laboratory focused on the development of diagnostic and eradication methods of important grapevine pathogens. The work performed in this lab pioneered the present testing methods used in industry and government labs.

Judit is a native of Argentina, where she received a B.S. in Agriculture from the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. She received an M.S. in Plant Pathology from the University of Arkansas Fayetteville and a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1990-1993, Judit was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and National Institute of Health (NIH).

Judit is active in professional associations such as the International Council for the Study of Viruses and Virus-like Diseases of the Grapevine (ICVG), serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for Phytopathology, Plant Disease and American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, and was a member of ISF (previously ASSINSEL) Disease Resistance Coding Work Group. With numerous articles, research grants and patents credited to her name, Judit is frequently invited to speak at growers and scientific meetings.