Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Jae Young Choi

Jae Young Choi, first author of Natural variation in plant telomere length is associated with flowering time

Current Position: Postdoc, Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University (USA)

Education: Ph.D., Cornell University (USA)

Non-scientific Interests: I think I use to like doing a lot of things, but now it’s trying my best to be a dad for my newborn daughter in the middle of a pandemic.

Brief bio: I was trained as a population geneticist using Drosophila as a model organism under the guidance of my graduate advisor Dr. Chip Aquadro. Drosophila is a great system to study evolution but I wanted a new challenge and study system to research for my postdoc. So I teamed up with my current postdoc advisor Dr. Michael Purugganan who gave me a lot of generous leeway to pursue different research involving wild and domesticated plants. I’m fascinated by how plants are able to adapt to its surrounding and the evolutionary genomic processes that were involved during its adaptation. Currently I’m interested in how variations in the noncoding regions of the genome are involved in the adaptive evolution of a plant.