Siobhan Brady, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center, has been selected to join the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator program. (TJ Ushing / UC Davis)
Siobhan Brady, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center, has been selected to join the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator program. (TJ Ushing / UC Davis)

Plant Biologist Siobhan Brady Named HHMI Investigator

  • by Liana Wait

Siobhan Brady, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center, has been selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. The prestigious Investigator program, which Brady describes as “life changing,” will provide her with roughly $9 million in research support over a seven-year term, with the option to renew.

Brady’s research aims to understand how plants use their roots to respond to environmental stressors, and to use this information to develop plants that are better able to respond to climate change. To do this, Brady’s lab employs a range of techniques, from genomic and cellular analysis to evolutionary comparisons. With HHMI’s support, she will be able to expand her research scope to explore roots in new and boundary-pushing ways.

“It's the kind of opportunity that will allow me to do really bold science—high-risk, high-reward research,” Brady said. “I actually couldn't believe it was real. It was only after I read it out to my husband that I was like, okay, now it's really real.”

Brady joins two other HHMI Investigators at the University of California Davis—Neil Hunter in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Jorge Dubcovsky in the Department of Plant Sciences.

Read the full story here.