Rate My Professor John McKay

John McKay is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Biology at Colorado State University in the College of Agricultural Sciences. He has been on the faculty since 2006, initially as an assistant professor from 2006 to 2011 and then as associate professor from 2011 to the present. Prior to CSU, McKay held positions at the University of California, Davis, including project scientist in the Department of Plant Sciences from 2005 to 2006 and postdoctoral researcher in Agronomy and Range Science from 2002 to 2005. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Montana in 2001 and a B.S. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1995. Additionally, he serves as a visiting professor at the Evolutionary Biology Center of Uppsala University since 2012.

McKay's research centers on the ecology, evolution, and genetics of local adaptation in plants, particularly mechanisms of drought stress tolerance and phenotypic evolution in natural and cultivated populations. He leads the McKay Lab, which examines genotype-by-environment interactions, genomics of climate adaptation, and applications to crop breeding, conservation genomics, and bioenergy crops such as rice and maize. A key project is a $6.1 million ARPA-E Department of Energy initiative evaluating corn root traits for enhanced water and nutrient use efficiency, soil carbon uptake, and productivity. McKay was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019 for distinguished contributions integrating ecophysiology, genetics, and genomics. He was named a Monfort Professor at CSU in 2012, a two-year honor recognizing his research, teaching, and service. He has taught graduate courses including Molecular and Genome Evolution, Evolutionary Ecology, and Plant Breeding for Drought Tolerance, and mentors undergraduates in research. His outreach earned the 2009 Community Science Outreach Award from Putnam Elementary School. Notable publications include "Exploiting Differential Gene Expression and Epistasis to Discover Candidate Genes for Drought-Associated QTLs in Arabidopsis thaliana" (The Plant Cell, 2015), "Genomics and the challenging translation into conservation practice" (Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2015), "Direct and indirect selection on flowering time, water-use efficiency (WUE, δ¹³C), and WUE plasticity to drought in Arabidopsis thaliana" (Ecology and Evolution, 2014), and "Ecological genetics of range size variation in Boechera spp. (Brassicaceae)" (Ecology and Evolution, 2015). He delivered featured talks at the 2011 Keystone Meeting on Plant Abiotic Stress Tolerance Mechanisms and the 2010 Ecological Genomics Symposium.