JTGP collaborator Chris Smith profiled on Tucson.com

Tucson.com, the online edition of the Arizona Daily Star, has a big new profile of Joshua Tree Genome Project collaborator, and now lead PI on the collaborative NSF grant supporting the project, Chris Smith. Smith grew up in Tucson and earned his undergrad degree at the University of Arizona, and the article goes in-depth on his longtime love of desert landscapes and the organisms that make a living in them:

Smith’s early work focused on yucca plants in isolated desert mountain ranges known as “sky islands” and the cactus longhorn beetle, a strange flightless bug that feeds on prickly pear and cholla in northern Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.

Then he met renowned evolutionary biologist Nils Olof Pellmyr, who steered him toward the fascinating bond between Joshua trees and the highly specialized yucca moths that live on them.

(“Olle” Pellmyr, who passed away in 2017, also mentored JTGP collaborators Jim Leebens-Mack and Jeremy Yoder.)