Tim Paape is a Research Geneticist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), who works in the areas of plant and crop genetics, genomics, and molecular biology. He is directly employed with the USDA-ARS Responsive Agriculture Food Systems Research Unit (RAFSRU) located on the Texas A&M College Station campus. The research unit works in collaboration with IHA, and is collocated in the Norman E. Borlaug Building.
Dr. Paape received his PhD from the University of California – San Diego, and has held research positions at the University of Minnesota, University of Zurich, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Children’s Nutrition Research Center (CNRC). He has worked in model plants such as Arabidopsis and Medicago, as well as crops such as corn, wheat and sorghum. His research uses interdisciplinary approaches to identify the underlying genetic basis of traits in plants that improve nutritional qualities, such as micronutrient accumulation in crops, antioxidant properties in crops, and how plants can isolate and remove toxic metal ions from edible parts of plants.
His research also involves crop development of approaches that simultaneously improve nutritional qualities in staple and specialty crops, while still maintaining high yield. He also works collaboratively with RAFSRU, CNRC, and IHA and other ARS scientists to conduct diet studies on agricultural products to quantify health benefits of biofortified crops.