Seeding Solutions

Katie Murphy, PhD, was an undergraduate research assistant at Stanford University when she discovered her passion for corn. Every morning, she and her colleagues would weed and tend to a cornfield while cultivating their ability to ask meaningful and measurable scientific questions. As a first-year chemistry major seeking any available paid research opportunity, she had serendipitously landed a spot in the lab of one of the world’s premier corn experts, Virginia Walbot. 

“I fell in love with corn,” Murphy says. “I realized that plants are way better at chemistry than I ever could be — they’re doing chemistry all the time.”  As she progressed in her career, her students dubbed her “the corn queen.” The name stuck. It followed her to the University of California, Davis, where she earned a doctorate in plant biology and became a pioneering plant scientist in her own right.

Plants As Problem-Solvers

Today, Murphy is the director of the Phenotyping Core Facility at St. Louis’ Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a nonprofit research institute whose mission is to improve the human condition through plant science. A broad and dynamic field, plant science influences everything from agriculture to pharmaceuticals. It combines biology, chemistry, genomics, and other disciplines to study and utilize plants for the greater good, with a focus on the two “big Hs” — hunger and health.      

Regarding hunger, plant science is key to making more food, healthier food, and more environmentally sustainable food amid global population growth, a changing climate, and the acceleration of extreme weather events. In terms of health, plants are the source of many medicines and have a strong track record of revealing important insights about human genetics and biology. 

Murphy underscores this interconnectedness between plants and humans, drawing a parallel to medicine. “Scientists interested in human biology might ask, ‘Why do some people get sick and others don’t?’” she says. “That’s an important question to keep people healthy. The same questions apply to plants. Plants are quite elastic and change a lot with different environments. We’re trying to understand why, so we can advance the health and sustainability of people and our planet.”

This work is the heart of an industry known as agtech, of which St. Louis is a leading player nationally: applying plant science to create health-enhancing products and technology for farmers and consumers. “Everything we interact with is related to plants — the clothes we wear, the materials we use, the fuel that powers our cars and our homes, down to every single thing we eat,” says Murphy, who first joined the Danforth Center as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021. “There’s so much at stake if we don’t investigate this secret world of plants.” 

At the Center of It All

This philosophy underpinned the founding of the Danforth Center in 1998 by the late William H. Danforth, MD, chancellor emeritus of Washington University in St. Louis from 1971 to 1995, and the center’s founding chairman through 2013. Today, the Danforth Center is the largest nonprofit organization of its kind — home to more than 400 scientists representing over 35 countries, all focused on research at the nexus of food, energy, and the environment.

Combining their expertise in plant biology, computer science, engineering, statistics, and education, they lead collaborative research in six main areas. And, with its recently established 140-acre field research site just outside St. Louis, the center is now also leveraging geospatial tools to advance plant science as a member of the Taylor Geospatial Institute, a local geospatial research collaborative founded in 2022. For example, satellites and drones can accurately capture large amounts of data about plants as they grow in real time and reduce the human labor required to collect plant data.  

As the leader of the phenotyping facility, Murphy and her team have access to highly efficient and data-driven technology to assess plant growth under different conditions. (The term phenotyping refers to measuring observable traits — e.g., plant height, width, or color.) For example, up to 1,140 plants live on a conveyor belt in an environmentally controlled growth chamber in the facility, where they are automatically fertilized, watered, and weighed. The plants also rotate through two imaging stations that take multiple images per day to better understand their ability to use water, retain nutrients, generate energy from sunlight, and how they react to various environmental stresses. 

The facility also supports external researchers and local startups in conducting their own studies, such as Pluton Biosciences and Elemental Enzymes, two St. Louis-based companies that devise natural solutions to address a changing climate. “That’s a wonderful part of the job, getting to work with people from all over,” Murphy says. “The Danforth Center and St. Louis are like a giant magnet for plant scientists, bringing together the best and brightest across the world.”

Indeed, St. Louis is home to more than 1,000 individuals with doctoral degrees in plant science — the largest concentration of such experts in the world. And the Danforth Center is not the only plant science magnet: 39 North is a nonprofit working to leverage and elevate the 600-acre agtech innovation district that includes the Danforth Center, scientists, startups, companies, and cutting-edge facilities. The nonprofit BioSTL advances local innovation in the biosciences. And the Gates Foundation recently established the Gates Agricultural Innovations (Gates Ag One) here.

Science Beyond the Lab

Meanwhile, Murphy communicates the meaning and value of plant science nationally and beyond as a talented, albeit informal, public science educator. In 2021, when she was a postdoc at the Danforth Center, as part of a required “broader impact” section of a federal grant, Murphy was tasked with launching a social media outreach project that would become Real Time Science. The video series, posted to Instagram and TikTok, peels back the curtain behind who scientists are and what they actually do — in real time. “The reality of science as a career is you don’t know the answers,” she says. “We were basically saying, ‘Come into the lab and learn with us.’”

With videos ranging from corn conveyor-belt selfies to how-tos for making an impromptu hair tie out of a disposable glove, Murphy’s energetic and inviting scientist persona soon attracted a large and diverse audience. At one point, Murphy was notified by a friend who taught fourth grade in Boise, Idaho, that Real Time Science had surfaced in her inbox as part of the learning content platform “Newsela.” Later, partly owing to TikTok’s capricious algorithm, the videos suddenly gained traction with a group of corn farmers.

In addition to displaying the scientific process in an entertaining and relatable way, Murphy used the platform to dispel myths about scientists themselves and what life as a scientist entails. “We know that kids typically draw an older man in a white lab coat if you ask them to draw a scientist,” she says. “That’s not what I nor many of my colleagues look like. It’s important to me to showcase who scientists really are.”

Murphy remains actively engaged in science communication and education in other ways as well. She and others at the Danforth Center contributed to the “Kernels of Culture: Maize Around the World” exhibit at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum in the Missouri Botanical Garden, open through the end of March 2025. The exhibit highlights the latest in the Danforth Center’s research alongside the long and winding history of corn through art, artifacts, and other cultural items.

Murphy also has partnered on multiple projects with the Danforth Center’s Education Research & Outreach Lab, geared toward both students and teachers. She serves as a co-principal investigator and mentor for the new Pivot2Plants initiative, a one-year training program for people seeking to transition into plant or data science careers. “I love what I do so much,” Murphy says. “It brings me a lot of joy to share it with others.” 

Meanwhile, Murphy also loves living in St. Louis. Beyond her busy work schedule, she teaches classes in high intensity interval training (HIIT) at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center in Creve Coeur. She relishes the chance to visit the Saint Louis Art Museum and other venerable area cultural institutions for free or for minimal cost. And she finds St. Louisans themselves exceptionally friendly, welcoming, and supportive. “I’m not a St. Louis native, but I feel like it’s my home now,” she says. “People are kind and there’s so much fun stuff to do, on top of being able to do the job I love.”

Indeed, for the corn queen, it might be said that all roads lead back to corn and the study of plants. St. Louis more than checks that box for Murphy too. “St. Louis really is the epicenter of plant science,” she says. “Yes, there are other wonderful places to study and work, but if you want to make sure you can put roots down in a city — pun intended — and you want to be a plant scientist, move to St. Louis.”