Dr. Jonathan Wendel is his name, and cotton is his game.

With a desk adorned with cotton boll souvenirs from Australia to Egypt, walls covered in diagrams and comparative pictures of the species of cotton, at first glance, Wendel seems to know his stuff about the ancient domesticated plant.

Recently, the National Science Foundation confirmed that he does, awarding Wendel, professor of botany, a five-year, $4.2 million grant to study the comparative evolutionary genomics of cotton. Out of 23 collaborate research projects sponsored by the NSF, Wendel’s grant was the only one awarded in the area of cotton this fiscal year.

“It’s incredibly humbling,” Wendel said about the grant. “I try to look at it in a positive light, as an incredible research opportunity. It’s a great thing for Iowa and the cotton community worldwide.”

Throughout the course of the project, the professor will work with researchers from the University of Georgia and the University of Arizona, continuing a long-time collaboration. Wendel said he is also working with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to bring a strong educational and training component into the project by incorporating ISU students.

“We can build something really lasting,” Wendel said. “Iowa State is one of the centers of the universe for plant genomics science. Iowans should feel very lucky.”

So, why cotton?

“I see it as child’s play,” said Wendel, who loves his job and what he does day in and day out. “I feel very privileged.”

His love for cotton began while he was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, studying camellia plants. Wendel said there were also cotton plants in the greenhouse, and he simply began playing around with them just for fun. Soon this new interest became intriguing to Wendel.

The cotton plant has quite an ancestral history. Millions of years ago, cotton split into two groups — one set in the Americas and one set in Africa and Asia, Wendel said.

After evolving in isolation, the two sets came together from the two distantly separated hemispheres to form a polyploid, a plant with double the number of genes.

“There is a great mystery of the origin of the New World polyploids,” Wendel said.

“I fell in love with that mystery. I want to discover how this marvelous evolutionary step was initiated.”

The mystery behind the convergence of the plants into polyploids is what motivates Wendel in his work.

“Where does this come from? How does nature make a new structure? This is the fundamental driving force behind the NSF project,” Wendel said. “We’re going after the smoking gun of evolutionary change.”

With much of the research for the study being conducted here at Iowa State, Wendel relies heavily on his research lab technicians, what he calls the “Cotton Mafia, Iowa’s cotton research community.” As an avid runner and triathlon competitor, Wendel sets one real obligation for the group.

“They have to run road races, or they don’t survive,” he said.

This grows from Wendel’s belief that running and researching are similar.

“At the finish line of one, I’m always planning for the next,” Wendel said.

In addition to the work completed in the research lab, Wendel and his colleagues rely heavily on the cotton plants grown in the Pohlman Conservatory at the top of Bessey Hall.

Despite its 40-degree temperature, Ames seems closer to the tropics when in the conservatory. Containing more than 1,000 species of plants — many of them tropical — and nearly 50 species of cotton, the conservatory has much to provide to researchers like Wendel.

“We grow everything up here,” said Wendel, pointing out plants bearing pomegranates, figs and coffee beans. “Every plant has a story.”

He attributes much of what his research has accomplished to the advancement of technology.

“It’s neat to see how technology has changed science,” Wendel said. “Experiments we only imagined decades ago we can now do. Hundreds of years from now, people will look back and say this was the biology era.”

He said he loves his job because he loves researching cotton. It’s apparent as soon as a person enters his office and sees the smile on his face.

“David Letterman once said ‘Science is really hard,'” Wendel said. “He was right, but I love it.”