Gage, Douglas

Dr. Douglas Gage supports cross-campus, interdisciplinary research initiatives and manages the Internal Grant program in the Office of Research & Innovation. He is the primary coordinator for the MSU Global Impact Initiative, a campus-wide effort to hire more than 100 new faculty in disciplines including STEM and biomedical research. He also represents the Office of Research & Innovation on the oversight committees for other major research initiatives, including the Institute for Quantitative Health Sciences and Engineering (IQ), the Institute for Integrative Toxicology, the Drug Discovery Initiative, the Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization Hub, and the Spectrum Health-MSU Research Alliance.

Gage chairs the University’s Advisory Council for oversight of high-risk international projects, including the USAID-funded GRAIN agricultural development project in Afghanistan. His other responsibilities have included being the academic lead on two major research building projects on campus: the Molecular Plant Sciences Building (2012) and the Interdisciplinary Sciences and Technology Building (2019). Recently, he has been part of the team planning the reactivation of MSU research that was suspended following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Gage remains a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology where his previous research focused on metabolic engineering of plant biochemical pathways. In 2002, he left MSU to take a position at Pfizer Global Research and Development in Ann Arbor, where he was a Senior Director leading the Discovery and Early Clinical Development biomarker effort. He returned to an administrative role at MSU in the fall of 2007.

Gage earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biology from Florida State University and his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Texas, Austin. He completed his post-doctoral training at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory and at the MSU NIH Mass Spectrometry Research Resource.