Kelly Swarts was a graduate student in the Buckler Lab at Cornell University, where she obtained her Ph.D. by conducting an acclaimed study on the origins of temperate adaptations of maize. After graduation, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. Currently, she’s a group leader at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology and at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories.