Sarah Hake 
2013 Hall of Fame Inductee

I'm Sarah Hake and I work for ARS at the Plant Gene Expression Center located in Albany California. 

My career began in research on developmental genetics and I worked on that in that area pretty much all of my life. 

I've been working for ARS for probably 27 years before that I was a post-doc in Berkeley California where I am located right now. 

I didn't grow up on a farm but my family all comes from family farmers' backgrounds they come from a farming background my grandparents and I all lived on farms. 

I think I was inspired to begin in science from biology classes at Grinnell College in Grinnell Iowa and most inspiring for me was a professor who taught plant taxonomy and encouraged me to go to graduate school. Went to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis and there fell in love with genetics where I met many of the well-known ARS geneticists such as Ed Coe. I worked in the lab of Virginia Walbot as a graduate student. 

From there I came to Berkeley and did a post-doc for six years before I landed the job that I have now and I've been grateful for that transition, always. 

Probably the most exciting discovery in my career was that of discovering the function of the knotted gene. Knotted was a mutant that I worked on as a post-doc and cloned the gene when I started my job with ARS. And, it was the first gene in plants that had a mutant phenotype, a morphological phenotype, and it encodes a homeobox gene so that discovery led to a lot of new ways of thinking about plants, that plants had developmental programs similar to animals and later, a few years later, we discovered that this transcription factor moves from cell to cell which was an unusual paradigm and now it's well know altogether and been shown for lots of transcription factors. 

Working with ARS was great because it gave me five years to really get my program going which is not as easy in an academic setting. We had great funding when I started I just wish that was true for the new scientists starting now and it's harder to get going and I think that the bridge between basic research and applied research is the best part about ARS that we've had the freedom to think about basic science but yet the inspiration to try to make it applied. 

We have a saying at the Plant Gene Expression Center that "if you do good science, application will follow" and that's really been the mantra of the Plant Gene Expression Center. Mostly we work with model organisms such as Arabidopsis but I've worked with maize all of my life and I love the fact that it is a model organism especially easy for genetics but it's also an important crop and it's a model in one way for other crops that are less easy to work with such as sugar cane, sorghum, switchgrass, etc. 

If I was to give advice to scientists starting out in careers with ARS I would say, find good colleagues, find good contacts, collaborate, try to go to as many meetings as possible, learn who's important, and volunteer as much as possible to review manuscripts, to sit on panels because you can't do it by yourself and that's more and more true in science that science is now requiring techniques and technologies that one person can't master so if you are a computational biologist get to know the basic scientists who will ask the right questions and if you are a biologist find a computational people who will work with you it's hard to do all of these things at one time and I think ARS has a chance sitting as it does between academic science and industry, it's really a great opportunity right now for ARS to move forward these big questions. 

When I'm not in the laboratory, I'm in the cornfields here in Albany but at home I work on the farm and so my husband and son run a small farm, organic farm where we grow produce and sell it locally to the people in the town and people from other towns. We have a … the business has been growing and growing it's very exciting to go home and be a farmer so when I am not doing my own science I am helping the farm and that's my greatest hobby. 

And to end, it is a great … it was a great honor to be inducted into the ARS Hall of Fame. I was very pleased at this opportunity and excited for women in general to be one of the few women who has been inducted and when I think about the other people's careers and how the very difficult science I did to be inducted and I think of my career and that I loved every single minute of it, I would hope that is true for everyone inducted into ARS but I also hope it's true for ARS scientist in general that they love their work because if you are not passionate about your work then it's not a good life.