Sarah Hake

BIOGRAPHY

Sarah Hake grew up in Iowa, moving to California with her family at the age of 10, then back to Iowa to attend Grinnell College. An inspiring botany professor, Vern Durkee, took her on a field trip to the botanical gardens in St. Louis that led to her decision to enter the plant biology program at Wash U. Although she was inspired to go to Wash U to do botanical field work, it was the evolution of maize that interested her, and she carried out her PhD with Virginia Walbot. When Virginia left Wash U to take a position at Stanford, Sarah did a similar move and ended up at Berkeley to work in the lab of Mike Freeling. There she was the first to clone a developmental gene using transposons and has worked in the area of developmental biology ever since.

After a six year postdoc and two children, she took a position at the Plant Gene Expression Center, in the nearby town of Albany. The Plant Gene Expression Center operates under a cooperative agreement between USDA-ARS and UC Berkeley. Housed in an Agricultural Research Service facility, Sarah and the other senior scientists are adjunct faculty at Berkeley. She has been Center Director of the Plant Gene Expression Center for the last 6 years. Her research focus remains on maize and development. With the recent sequencing of many plant genomes, including maize, the years of genetics are now being rewarded with rapid gene discovery that will allow improvements not only in maize, but other cereal crops and potential biofuel perennial grasses.