Iowa Corn Promotion Board Honors Dr. Patrick Schnable

Thursday, December 19, 2013 we honored the inaugural recipient of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board Endowed Chair in Genetics — Dr. Patrick Schnable.

We also honored Iowa State’s partnership with the Iowa Corn Promotion Board — especially a shared commitment to put science to work to address opportunities for farmers.

The Iowa Corn Promotion Board Endowed Chair in Genetics is a meaningful position for the Department of Agronomy and for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. This long-term support for research will enhance ISU’s prominence as a world leader in corn genomics. With the Iowa corn growers’ support, we will continue to build upon a legacy of more than 100 years of research and contributions to Iowa corn production.

Dr. Schnable is a Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a professor of agronomy. 

He serves as the founding director of Iowa State’s Center for Plant Genomics. He is a ChangJiang Scholar Professor at China Agriculture University in Beijing.

Dr. Schnable earned his bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Cornell University and was awarded a PhD in plant breeding and genetics from Iowa State University. As a post-doc, he conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Germany, before joining Iowa State in 1988.

Dr. Schnable is one of the world’s most respected scientists working in maize genetics and genomics. His research is cited by thousands of other scientists and he has presented on his research at numerous national and international scientific meetings. He has been instrumental in the advanced tools to the “tool box” used by scientists to explore the corn genome. He is the managing partner for Data2Bio, a company using cutting-edge genetic sequencing technologies to analyze research results. He has served as a member of scientific advisory boards of several public-sector plant genome projects. He is the author of over 120 peer-reviewed publications. He was the one of the lead authors of a ground-breaking paper on maize genome sequencing that appeared in Science magazine in 2009. Schnable is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an associate editor for Public Library of Science Genetics. He is chair of the American Society of Plant Biology’s Science Policy Committee and past chair of the Maize Genetics Executive Committee.

Through graduates of his program, Dr. Schnable’s influence is widely felt in today’s seed industry and many other laboratories around the country. Many of his former graduate students now are working in the seed industry or as faculty scientists. He also has provided more than 100 undergraduate students with early, hands-on research experiences.

The Iowa Corn Promotion Board congratulates him on this award.