Ali Bektas is a molecular biologist working on plants, microbes, and agriculture and is developing distributed, affordable, and easy-to-use systems for detecting informative nucleic acids in agricultural environments. He has worked at various Cannabis nurseries and biotech companies, acting as a consultant, staff scientist, and Chief Science Officer. Among other contributions in the field of cannabis science, he was one of the first scientists to publicly identify Hop Latent Viroid in Cannabis populations.