Alex Harkess received a late holiday gift from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his hard work at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology: a five-year, $1.6 million NSF Career Grant.

“This grant is the culmination of some impossibly big ideas from the last 15 years I have studied sex chromosomes,” Harkess said. “Those ideas have been made possible by my experiences and growth here at HudsonAlpha.”

This single-investigator grant will support Harkess and several members of his lab as they explore sex chromosome evolution, engineer artificial sex chromosomes in plants, and train the next generation of plant scientists at college campuses across the country, the latter being near and dear to Harkess.

Part of his NSF grant will go toward funding a training program called the American Campus Tree Genomes (ACTG) project, a training program begun in 2021 out of a crowd-funding event at Auburn University. Through ACTG, Harkess and colleague Les Goertzen developed a semester-long curriculum for students to assemble, annotate and publish college campus tree genomes.

ACTG is aimed at breaking barriers to science, technology, engineering and math caused by inequity in access to undergraduate research experiences.

“The program minimizes institutional barriers using the praxis-AI teaching platform, which is entirely internet browser-based,” Harkess said. “It also allows teaching and learning to occur in nontraditional settings. If students can access the internet, they can do the coursework.”

Two more institutes partnered with the ACTG program in 2022: Washington State University and the University of South Carolina-Aiken. Six more schools are already on board for this upcoming fall. With the help of the NSF grant, Harkess hopes to expand the program to reach 100 students per year, with an emphasis on those attending historically Black colleges and universities and community colleges.

Learn more about Harkess and his research at HudsonAlpha here.