USDA-ARS Research Scientists

USDA-ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center

The IHA has partnered with the United States Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) Children’s Nutrition Research Center (CNRC) in Houston, TX to hire new ARS scientists. These ARS scientists collaborate with IHA and are housed in College Station, Tx.

Tim Paape, Ph.D.

Research Geneticist

 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 Children’s Nutrition Research Center located at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. He is also affiliated with IHA, working in the Responsive Agriculture Focus area and his research unit is located in College Station on the Texas A&M campus.

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, and Brookhaven National Laboratory and has worked in model plants such as Arabidopsis and Medicago, as well as crops such as wheat and sorghum. His research uses interdisciplinary approaches to identify the underlying genetic basis of traits in plants that improve nutritional qualities, such 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 identifying stress responses in plants that can enable us to improve environmental resilience to water deficiencies, nutrient deficiencies such as nitrogen, iron, and zinc, and he is actively studying how plants and symbiotic soil microbes can improve stress tolerance and nutrient uptake by plants.