Three new faculty members have been hired by ISU’s Plant Sciences Institute to work in the plant sciences and bioinformatics centers. The new members are Xiaoqui Huang, Nicola Pohl and Steve Whitham. The Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics, where the new members will be working, is made up of a group of faculty across many departments, said Hal Stern, professor of statistics. “They were the group of faculty members across many departments that were interested in new technology to generate data about how biological systems work and to develop methods for interpreting these data,” he said. Xiaoqui Huang was hired to work for Iowa State’s Computer Science Department and for the Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics as an associate professor. While he works there, he will be doing research on the analysis of DNA sequences and developing computer programs for plant genome research. “He has been a real international leader in developing methods for combining DNA sequence information,” Stern said. Nichola Pohl joined the ISU chemistry department and the Center for Crops Utilization Research as an assistant professor. Her research area is the reductive chemistry of carbohydrates, and she will focus on the use of crops for bio-based industrial products. Steve Whitman joined Iowa State’s plant pathology department and the Center for Plant Responses to Environmental Stresses as an assistant professor. While at Iowa State, he will research host genes involved in supporting or restricting virus infections in plants. “At first he’d be teaching classes in algorithms and bioinformatics, but since his background is wider than that he could spread out and do more,” said Les Miller, professor and chairman of the computer science department. Colin Scanes, interim director of the institute, said all three are full members of academic departments. The new faculty will be doing research and also teaching graduate and undergraduate classes. The Plant Sciences Institute consists of eight research centers and more than 100 faculty from 15 departments are involved. The Institute’s goal is to be one of the world’s leading institutes for plant science research, education and unbiased research-based information.