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05 — About us & joinWe're a collaborative, interdisciplinary group where quantitative geneticists, machine-learning researchers, and plant biologists work side by side. If you want your science to reach real fields and real breeding programs, we'd like to hear from you.
The Lab for Plant Genomic Diversity & Design — formerly the Buckler Lab — reads the natural diversity of plant genomes to find the DNA changes behind complex traits, and uses that understanding to design more sustainable crops. We mine thousands of maize landraces and wild relatives, build DNA foundation models that learn across the flowering-plant tree of life, and turn our methods into open software used on more than 2,000 species worldwide.
We are a multi-PI team spanning USDA-ARS, Cornell University, the Boyce Thompson Institute, and the University of Florida, based in Ithaca, NY. Our most important output is people: around a hundred scientists have trained here and gone on to lead labs and teams across academia, industry, NGOs, and government.
Build and apply DNA foundation models (PlantCAD2, GeneCAD) — training, interpretation, and downstream tasks from conservation scoring to genome annotation across plants and beyond.
Map the genotype-to-phenotype relationship in maize and its relatives using pangenomes, association mapping, and genomic prediction at scale.
Connect nitrogen metabolism, cold tolerance, and season length to the CERCA / Nitrogen 2.0 ideotype — from candidate genes to field validation.
Don't see an exact match? We're always glad to hear from strong, curious scientists. Reach out with your CV and a note about what you'd like to work on.