Faculty Job: Myths & Realities - an interview with James Schnable

November 24th, 2019

About you

Describe your journey from student to newly appointed faculty

I was an undergraduate at Cornell University, first in economics and later switching to biology. Then I went to UC-Berkeley for my PhD where I worked in Michael Freeling’s lab on maize and sorghum comparative genomics. When I graduated from UC-Berkeley I was fortunate enough to receive an NSF PGRP postdoc fellowship which allowed me to first work on wild Setaria viridis (a C4 model) at the Danforth Center, and then travel to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing to learn about domesticated foxtail millet (Setaria italica) from Prof. Xianmin Diao.

What inspired you most to pursue your current career? 

I was born and raised in Ames, Iowa and my father is a maize geneticist. I grew up surrounded by corn and corn geneticists. When I went to college I wanted to study anything but biology. The reason I’m doing the work I am today is largely thanks to four people:

Kevin Ahern, a research tech who took me under his wing when I was an undergrad working in a research lab for spending money. That was the job where I got bitten by the plant science bug and fascinated by understanding how plants can perceive and respond to their environments.

Brad Barbazuk, my mentor during a summer REU, where I was first introduced to programming and bioinformatics. That was the first taste I received of how much faster I could run the “hypothesis; test; interpret” cycle when each failure was an error message when I tried to run a perl script after 30 seconds instead of a blank PCR gel after four hours.

Michael Freeling, my advisor during grad school who taught me how to use computational tools to still have the types of hypothesis driven questions about biology which had gotten be excited about plant science in the first place.

Eric Lyons, a fellow grad student and then postdoc who taught me how to actually talk coherently about the research I do and why it matters to people who aren’t in the exact same field as me. I don’t always succeed at that last one, but when I do it’s definitely thanks to the strategies I learned from him.

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Story by Arif Ashraf | Plantae ASPB