Rachel K. Pilloff is an associate with Foley & Lardner LLP, where she is a member of the Chemical, Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Practice. She drafts and prosecutes utility and plant patent applications as well as assists in opinion work and client counseling in all biotechnology areas, particularly plant physiology, molecular biology, genetics, gene therapy, immunology, drug delivery design, and related pharmaceuticals and food products.
Ms. Pilloff has training and experience in the fields of plant physiology and plant molecular biology. As a graduate student at The Pennsylvania State University, she was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) doctoral fellowship to study the genetic and molecular basis for programmed cell death during disease in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. She has experience in plant mutant characterization; gene mapping; generating and analyzing transgenic plants for both gain-of-function (constitutive and inducible expression systems) and loss-of-function studies (RNA interference and antisense); and single, double, and triple mutant construction for epistasis analyses.
In addition, she was a research assistant with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she performed HPLC and SFC column chromatography for analyzing the effects of elevated ozone and carbon dioxide levels on fatty acid saturation of agronomically important oil crops.
Ms. Pilloff graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with university honors from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. She was the 1998 recipient of the Appleton-Norton Memorial Prize in Biology for excellence in the life sciences. She holds graduate degrees in plant physiology from The Pennsylvania State University.
While working as a technical specialist at Foley & Lardner LLP for over six years, Ms. Pilloff earned her law degree from American University's Washington College of Law.
Ms. Pilloff is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and New York.
Publication:
· Pilloff, R., Devadas S., Enyedi A., and Raina R. (2002). The Arabidopsis gain-of-function mutant dll1 spontaneously develops lesions mimicking cell death associated with disease. Plant J 30:61-70.