Rate My Professor James Birchler

James Birchler is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he conducts research in Biology focusing on chromosome structure and function. He earned a B.S. in botany and zoology from Eastern Illinois University in 1972 and a Ph.D. in genetics with a minor in biochemistry from Indiana University in 1977. Birchler performed postdoctoral research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. He served as assistant professor and then associate professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University starting in 1985, before joining the University of Missouri-Columbia faculty in 1991, where he progressed to Curators’ Professor in 2009 and Curators’ Distinguished Professor.

The Birchler laboratory investigates gene expression in multicellular eukaryotes at gene-specific and chromosomal levels using Drosophila and maize. Key areas include inverse dosage effects in regulatory complexes that contribute to dosage compensation, aneuploid syndromes, and the gene balance hypothesis; RNAi-mediated transcriptional silencing via heterochromatin formation and histone modifications; chromosome painting techniques to visualize repetitive DNA, individual genes, transgenes, and transposable elements in maize; centromere epigenetics, including B chromosome centromeres, neocentromeres, and deletion analyses; and engineered artificial minichromosomes for protein production, novel trait introduction, and rapid gene editing in crops. Birchler has received the Barbara McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies in 2020, Southeastern Conference Professor of the Year and Faculty Achievement Awards in 2017, President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence from the University of Missouri System in 2015, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002, and numerous other honors including Faculty-Alumni Award and Einstein Professor. He has served on editorial boards of Genetics, The Plant Cell, and others, and the Maize Genetics Executive Committee. Prominent publications comprise “RNAi-mediated pathways in the nucleus” (Nature Reviews Genetics, 2005), “Heterosis” (The Plant Cell, 2010), “Understanding mechanisms of novel gene expression in polyploids” (Trends in Genetics, 2003), “Heterochromatic silencing and HP1 localization in Drosophila are dependent on the RNAi machinery” (Science, 2004), and “In search of the molecular basis of heterosis” (The Plant Cell, 2003).