James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

March 11, 2017

McClintock Prize

Filed under: Uncategorized — James @ 9:49 am

Last night my major professor received the McClintock Prize in Maize Genetics.

His acceptance talk was really exciting and full of his newest ideas about the big problems of biology and evolution. However, looking back at his history, one of the amazing things about his career is that he’s reinvented himself entirely, switching from a research program focused on transposons and developmental biology to an entirely different career focused on taking the rigorous hypothesis development and hypothesis testing to the world of comparative plant genomics (and he started when there was exactly one sequenced plant genome, so being able to do comparative work at the time was quite something).

In many ways it makes me nostalgic for my time in the lab. In grad school you are essentially paid to think, while it often feels like as a faculty member you are paid mostly to attend meetings, fill out forms, and spend four hours a day answering e-mails. 😉

But this post isn’t about me. Congratulations Mike! Really is one of the fathers of modern maize genetics.

A partial sample of the 76 people who either received their PhDs or Postdoc’d in the Freeling Lab at UC Berkeley

Complete list of lab alumni here.

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