Recognizing The Plant Cell first authors: Ken Jean-Baptiste

Ken Jean-Baptiste, first author of Dynamics of gene expression in single root cells of A. thaliana

Current Position: Ph.D. Candidate, Queitsch Lab, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States

Education: A.B. in Molecular Biology with the Applications of Computing Certificate, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States

Non-scientific Interests: music, Kendo, Manga, role-playing games, making puns

Brief bio: After finishing high school, I was obsessed with two things, biology and computer science, so I spent my time at Princeton learning about the problems and challenges tackled by computational biologists. I was fortunate to work with Ned Wingreen, studying metagenomic data from the Human Microbiome Project. This experience led me to consider graduate school which I started in Fall 2015. Needless to say, being a student at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences is a BLAST (pun very much intended). In Spring 2016, I joined the Queitsch lab to analyze high throughput genome-scale data from the reference plant Arabidopsis. In addition to my single cell RNA-seq studies, I also explore the relationship between chromatin accessibility and the phenomenon of acquired thermotolerance in Arabidopsis.