The Unwritten CV of a Plant Scientist
There is a particular look people give when you say you are a plant scientist. It falls somewhere between “Oh, that’s… nice” and the polite expression usually reserved for someone who has just confessed to collecting vintage doorknobs. Once, someone replied, “Ah, I love gardening too,” and I had to go and stand in the corridor for a while.
Plant science is, of course, a great deal more than growing plants. When we set out to write this article, we wanted to capture something we had both felt for a long time: the field quietly shapes the way we think and see the world, building skills and habits which never make it onto a CV. This is our attempt to write them down.
So… You Look at Leaves?
If you work on cancer, nobody asks you to justify your existence at a dinner party. If you work on stomatal conductance, you are approximately two sentences away from someone checking their phone.
Plant scientists pay a communication tax that starts on day one and never, ever stops. There’s a documented phenomenon called “plant blindness,” which is the human tendency to overlook plants, treating them as green wallpaper behind the animals doing the supposedly more interesting work (Jose et al., 2019).
The accidental benefit is that plant scientists become unusually good at making science accessible. Every seminar, every grant, every first date that includes the question “so what do you do?” requires us to make someone care about plants in under thirty seconds.
Most other scientists have to learn how to explain their work to non-specialists. Plant scientists have been doing it since our first Christmas break back home after starting a PhD.
Grant Rejection Bingo
In the time it takes to secure one round of funding, your colleague in another department has received three grants, a congratulatory email from the dean and a knighthood from the King of England. Meanwhile, we are on rejection number four and treating a $5 Walmart voucher as a notable financial event.
Plant science is chronically underfunded (NCSES, 2025), and living in that landscape develops a particular kind of persistence. You rewrite. You reframe. You send it out again. You learn that rejection is not a referendum on your worth, merely the entry fee for working in a field whose importance still has to be explained before it can be funded. (See point one. It’s all connected.)
You brush it off and carry on. Plant scientists are a resilient bunch. And the ability to believe in your work when nobody else does is no small thing.
You’ll Need a Bigger Meeting Room
Plant science pulls you into rooms you didn’t expect to be in.
One week you’re troubleshooting cloning strategies at the bench; the next, you’re talking with local farmers about the problems they face; the week after that, you’re presenting to a government advisory panel on how a policy change might affect the country’s flora. Plant science sits at the intersection of so many sectors: genetics, molecular biology, bioinformatics, agriculture, food, environment, health, policy (plus many more). And it’s more often than not the plant scientist who takes on the role of translating for everyone else.
I was once working with an organic chemist to study enzyme function. We were discussing how the plant might have acquired this novel activity – to me, obviously across an evolutionary timescale. The chemist asked, completely sincerely, “How long are we talking for a plant to acquire a new gene? Days, or a month?”
And that, in a nutshell, is what interdisciplinary collaboration looks like in plant science.
Your Calendar Belongs to Your Organisms
There’s a moment that comes early, perhaps during a master’s or the start of a PhD, when you notice others who started at the same time are already reporting results. Meanwhile, you… have grown some plants?
It’s a plight familiar to many of those who work with non-model organisms, and our deepest sympathies to anyone working with trees! You have to wait for things to grow before you can really do what you planned. From this point on, it’s a constant battle with a mix of impostor syndrome and feeling like you’re not working hard enough.
But those feelings come with a realisation: our work simply follows a different tempo, one with a seasonality, dictated by the organisms we study rather than the academic calendar. Embracing it, we learn how to sprint without burning out and how to rest without feeling guilty. Not every phase of work is supposed to look the same. There are seasons for generating data and seasons for making sense of it.
In a world that rewards instant results, plant science teaches you delayed gratification. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was your F2 generation.
Gantt Charts Are Fiction, and We All Know It
If you’ve ever made a Gantt chart for a plant science project and had it go to plan, please get in touch. We have follow-up questions.
Growth chambers break. Pests arrive uninvited. A heatwave rewrites six months of planning. The confocal slot you waited weeks for coincides precisely with the afternoon your samples look like they’ve been through a washing machine. None of this is unusual. It’s just another Wednesday.
One time, I’d spent weeks planning a large-scale infiltration experiment, timed everything perfectly around when the plants would be at the right stage, and then watched them bolt early because the growth room ran a few degrees warm over a weekend. Weeks of preparation. Dozens of plants unusable. Nothing to do but start again.
You’d think this would make us pessimists. It doesn’t. It makes us very good at Plan B. And C. And D. It’s not a skill that fits neatly on a CV, but it probably should.
We’ve Become One with the World
If I had a penny for every plant scientist who is devoted to causes like the environment or climate, I’d have… enough pennies to fund a plant science grant.
I was in Sainsbury’s (British supermarket), doing my weekly shop, when I noticed the Galaxy chocolate bars were 50p more than they were last year. My mind went straight to the news linking drought and climate change to falling cacao yields (Pell, 2025). Then came the image of my own yellowing, wilting, fly-bitten plants in the greenhouse from when I was studying drought stress.
At some point, your work begins to merge with the world around you, and the usual scientific detachment starts to fall away. The abstract words you hear on the news stop being abstract. Driest winter in twenty years? You know exactly what that will do to the plants. Wildfires in California? You’re wondering what will happen to the mycorrhizal fungi. The headlines say, “Avocados are a superfood: eat them and lose weight.” You’re worrying about how water shortages are fuelling conflict in Chile. It becomes difficult to enjoy Sunday brunch in quite the same way after that.
Somewhere along the way, this stops being a professional habit and starts becoming a kind of sixth sense. You start considering not only the parts, but the whole. Plant science makes people systems thinkers, whether we intended it or not.
This Was Not in the Job Ad
The stereotype of a scientist involves a pristine lab coat and clean fingernails. Where do these scientists work? It sounds lovely.
I do molecular work. I am, supposedly, a lab-based scientist. And yet a surprising amount of my life is spent hauling compost, shifting trays of pots and crawling around growth rooms, leaving me looking like I lost an argument with a flower bed.
The moment I truly wondered what I had signed up for came when I was standing in the glasshouse at the roof of the building, covering the walls with makeshift double-sided tape and bits of cardboard previously destined for recycling, all to trick my plants into thinking it was winter.
Studying plants quietly erodes any preconception you may have had about what research is supposed to look like. That turns out to be a useful life lesson: the things we end up loving rarely look the way we expected.
None of us chose plant science because we thought it would make us versatile. But somewhere between the rejected grants, the bolting plants, and the seventh attempt at explaining our research to a taxi driver, it quietly did. Plant science stopped being just what we do and started being what made us who we are.
Your CV says ‘plant scientist.’ Consider this the unwritten part.
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References
Jose, S. B., Wu, C. H., & Kamoun, S. (2019). Overcoming plant blindness in science, education, and society. Plants People Planet, 1(3), 169–172. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.51
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (2025). Federal Funds for Research and Development: Fiscal Years 2023–24. NSF 25-328. U.S. National Science Foundation. https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/federal-funds-research-development/2023-2024/
Pell, M. (2025) ‘It’s a perfect storm’: Why has chocolate become so expensive? Manchester Evening News https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/its-perfect-storm-chocolate-become-32228732
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About the Authors
Anastasia Kolesnikova is a final-year PhD student at the University of Southampton. Her work combines plants, genetics, and evolutionary principles to find out why we domesticated certain plant species, but not others. She would like it on record that she did not, in fact, manage to convince her plants it was winter. Find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/n-ksci/
Charlay Wood is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison working on plant metabolic engineering, redirecting atmospheric CO₂ into high-value natural products including pharmaceuticals, flavour compounds, and sustainable alternatives to synthetic food dyes. She would like it on record that she has never once been into gardening. Find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlaywood/
