When Emmanuel Gonzalez was a kid growing up in El Centro, CA, he developed an interest in both astronomy. Who knew looking up at the stars would lead to a fascination with plants.

He decided to pursue his interest in plants by earning a BS in Biology with an emphasis in plant biology from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. He is now a PhD student in Dr. Duke Pauli’s lab at the University of Arizona School of Plant Sciences. Emmanuel’s research involves leveraging sensor technology, high performance computing, and machine learning to extract phenotypic trait information from the world’s largest robotic field scanner at the University of Arizona’s Maricopa Agricultural Center. 

He sat down with Marc Zienkiewicz in Ames, Iowa, last month to talk about how that early fascination with the night sky led to his love of plants and why his work is important for plant breeding, especially lettuce and sorghum.

“I grew up looking up at the stars and thinking, ‘Wow, there’s a lot out there.’ So at a young age, my mom bought me an inexpensive telescope, and although you couldn’t see much, you could see just how amazing it was out in the universe. And the initial curiosity drove me to look at plants mainly because of my family,” he says.

“My family is made up of primarily migrant field workers. So my grandfather worked in lettuce fields in the Imperial Valley. And I was just interested in the stories that he would come home to tell us. So I thought, ‘Well, plants have also undergone a lot of changes over the years through domestication.’ So to me, there was a connection there, in the complexity of the universe and the complexity of the plants that we see today.”

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