Julia Bailey-Serres, an IIGB professor of genetics and director of the Center for Plant Cell Biology (CEPCEB), has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for her excellence in original scientific research.

Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. Bailey-Serres, who learned of her election today (May 3, 2016) during the academy’s 153rd annual meeting in Washington, D.C., will be inducted in April during the next annual meeting.

Bailey-Serres is being recognized for the discovery of a gene that allows rice to survive under water. That gene has subsequently been introduced through breeding, creating a flood-tolerant rice variety that is grown by more than one million farmers in flood-prone areas of Asia.

Julia is now the fifth IIGB member (and fourth CEPCEB member) to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (Susan Wessler, Alexander Raikhel, Natasha Raikhel, Xuemei Chen). There are seven NAS members on campus.

Bailey-Serres is a graduate of the University of Utah. She has a Ph.D. from Edinburgh University. She has been a member of the faculty at UC Riverside since 1990. Her research group studies the sensing, signaling and acclimation responses to low oxygen stress in plants. Her multidisciplinary approach combines genetic, molecular, biochemical and bioinformatic technologies and has significant implications for agricultural and global food challenges.

She has received international attention for her group’s dissection of the mechanistic role of the SUB1A gene in conferring submergence tolerance in rice. Her accomplishments also include the pioneering of methods for profiling the “translatomes” of discrete cell-types of plants and identification of a homeostatic sensor of oxygen deprivation in plants.