Faculty in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry 

Dr. James A. Saunders is director, Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics (MB3), and a faculty member of both the Biology and Chemistry Departments at Towson University. He earned a BA in zoology from the University of South Florida (1971) and a Ph.D. in botany, with a minor in chemistry, from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio (1975). His postdoctoral work was done in the Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics, University of California, Davis 1975-77. Dr. Saunders’s research interests are in the plant biochemistry of secondary natural products, including alkaloids, phenolics, drugs of abuse, smoking and tobacco issues, and the chocolate industry, as well as in molecular biology with emphasis on DNA fingerprinting, gene transfer, and gene expression methodology. He has authored 96 career publications, edited 9 books, and made over 250 scientific presentations on many different topics, including plant/insect interactions, subcellular localization, enzymology, drug crops, and gene transfer, as well as many aspects of plant natural products chemistry.