Julian Schroeder's Laboratory

Our laboratory's research is directed at the signal transduction mechanisms and pathways that mediate resistance to abiotic stresses in plants, in particular responses to elevated drought, CO₂, salt stress, and heavy metal stress. These abiotic stresses have substantial negative impacts and reduce crop productivity, plant growth and biomass production. These stresses are also relevant in reference to increasing yields to meet the food needs of the growing human population. Members in our lab are being trained in interdisciplinary and systems biological techniques while pursuing individual research projects.

Julian Schroeder is Novartis Chair and Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego and was founding Co-Director of the Center for Food and Fuel for the 21st Century at UCSD. He received his PhD working with Erwin Neher at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Julian pioneered characterizations of plant ion channels, which led to models of their unique functions in plant biology. He also pioneered functional characterizations of genes encoding plant ion transport proteins and their roles in stress tolerance of plants. His present research has identified mechanisms and genes that allow plants to withstand drought and salinity stress. His laboratory has discovered CO2-binding proteins and mechanisms that mediate plant responses to CO2 elevation and leaf CO2 concentration changes and has found that these CO2 binding proteins can be used to increase the instantaneous water use efficiency of plants. In recent research his laboratory is discovering mechanisms by which plants can protect themselves from heat stress.

Julian Schroeder has received awards, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award from NSF, the Charles Albert Shull Award from the American Soc. of Plant Biologists, shared a DFG Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Research Prize, received the Blasker Award in Science and Engineering. He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried Munich. Schroeder is named Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information/Clarivate since 2002 to present, received a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship from Humboldt Foundation as a postdoctoral scholar, received a Khalifa Award for research and agricultural innovation, received the 2020 Stephen Hales Prize from the American Society of Plant Biologists, received an NSF extension for special creativity (2022), the 2022 Shang-Fa Yang Award and Memorial Lecture in Taipei, was named Corresponding Member the Australian Society of Plant Scientists (ASPS, 2022) and received the Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Prize in 2022 and was named Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists (2022). He is Overseas Fellow of Winston Churchill College, Cambridge University. With collaborators he shared the Cozzarelli Prize from PNAS (2010) and a top 10 breakthrough of the year selected by Science (2009). He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.