Recognizing Plant Cell first authors: Rob Schaefer

Rob Schaefer, first author of Integrating co-expression networks with GWAS to prioritize causal genes in maize

Current Position: Postdoctoral Associate, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Minnesota

Education: 2015 – Ph.D., Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology, University of Minnesota, 2010 – B.S., Computer Science, University of Minnesota

Non-scientific Interests: Open-source, open-science, yoga, swimming, and long-boarding

Brief bio: I am an avid software developer and computational biologist with a focus in agricultural species. It is my mission to work with scientists investigating important plant and animal species and to develop the best, data-driven, computational approaches possible. During my PhD, I developed integrative approaches to combine results from genome wide association studies with gene co-expression networks to describe elemental accumulation in maize kernels. In 2016, under a USDA NIFA AFRI postdoctoral fellowship, I translated these co-expression network based approaches to study muscle disease in the horse. I’m currently a postdoctoral associate in the Equine Genetics and Genomics Lab at the University of Minnesota. I push code to github.com/schae234