Julia Bailey-Serres

Julia Bailey-Serres is a distinguished professor of genetics and MacArthur Foundation chair at the University of California, Riverside. A California native, she received a PhD in botany from the University of Edinburgh and began to research hypoxia and flooding biology of plants as postdoc at UC Berkeley. Bailey-Serres studies mechanisms that safeguard yields of rice and other crops in unpredictable environments. Her group dissected roles of the SUBMERGENCE 1A gene of rice in providing survival of complete submergence, which has a stabilizing effect on yield in flood-prone regions of Asia. Her group’s research has clarified how plants sense and respond to hypoxia and the resultant energy crisis. She pioneered technologies to uncover gene activity and regulatory networks in specific cells - from chromatin to mRNA translation. Her current research focuses on root traits that are beneficial in both waterlogged and dry soils, focusing on gene regulatory networks that control tissue level plasticity. Their work also considers the interaction between rice and beneficial microbes in the context of water extremes. As director of UC Riverside’s Center for Plant Cell Biology, she cultivates undergraduates research experiences and graduate student collaboration and entrepreneurship through the Plants3D program. Bailey-Serres is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.