Raymond Rodriguez is a Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology and is currently Director of the NIH-sponsored Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics at UC Davis. After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974, he was an A.P. Giannini Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Herbert W. Boyer at UC San Francisco Medical Center. While at UCSF, Dr. Rodriguez developed molecular cloning technologies that now serve as the foundation for the biotechnology industry.

In 2003 he became Director of the Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics, a multi-investigator, multi-institutional research program to study the impact of diet-genome interactions on human health. For his leadership in the field of nutritional genomics, Dr. Rodriguez was selected as the 2008 distinguished lecturer by the USDA-ARS Beltsville Center and in 2009 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. Dr. Rodriguez is a member of numerous scientific organizations and committees and he has been an adviser to the NIH and NSF since 1988. He has published numerous articles and books on molecular biology and biotechnology. Dr. Rodriguez holds 18 U.S. patents and his current research focus is nutritional epigenomics, the study of how dietary factors alter human gene activity by chromatin modification. He holds a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz.