James A. Birchler

Early life and education Birchler was born on a farm near Red Bud, Illinois. He attended Eastern Illinois University where he initially majored in education and was mentored by ethnobotanist Charles Arzeni. After completing his degree at EIU in 1972, ultimately majoring in biology with a minor in zoology, he moved to Indiana University Bloomington where he studied maize dosage effects using B chromosomes with Drew Schwartz, graduating in 1977. Between 1978 and 1985 he worked as a postdoc studying gene dosage mechanisms in fruit flies, first at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with Ed Grell, and then at the University of California, Berkeley with Kenneth Paigen. In 1985 he was hired as an assistant professor at Harvard University, and in 1991 he moved to the University of Missouri. James A. Birchler also developed Fast-Flowering Mini-Maize as a small, rapid-cycling model for maize.

Recognition 2002 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 2014 Einstein Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 2017 SEC Professor of the Year. 2020 McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies