Recognizing Plant Physiology first authors: James Campanella

James Campanella, first author of Evidence for exaptation of the Marchantia polymorpha M20D peptidase MpILR1 into the tracheophyte auxin regulatory pathway

Current position: James Campanella is a professor of genetics at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.

Education: He earned bachelors and master’s degrees in biology at University of Chicago and received his PhD in plant molecular biology from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in the laboratory of Christopher Town.  He did his post-doctoral work at Lehigh University as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) fellow.

Brief bio: His laboratory research has been split between two major genetic topics over the last few years. He has published a series of studies in molecular ecology/population genetics, analyzing the “genetic health” of several plant species including western Atlantic sea grasses and Caribbean mangroves. His other major interest has been the molecular evolution of plant regulatory pathways, with a particular focus on auxin conjugate regulatory controls. He is co-author of the highly employed sequence analysis tool MatGAT. He has also hosted a popular science podcast for the last decade on the Hugo-award-winning, online audio show StarShipSofa.