Profile
Tobias Baskin
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About Me:
I live out in the countryside in New England. Not old England. I am a professor of Biology at a Uni here, teaching and studying about plants. I love music, art, gardening, and going for long walks in the woods.
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My wife is a costume designer, she makes outfits for a local theater company (and for her and me too!). We spent a year (from August 23 to August 2024) at Birmingham, UK. We liked living there. The canals are amazing. I got turned on to science when I was at Uni looking down a microscope. The structures were colorful and elegant. And I marvelled that they could be seen at all. And a lot of my work even now involves microscopes. Using them makes me happy to go to work. I get the same kind of enjoyment from making an invisible part of the world visible as I do from reading a novel or listening to music. I am in it for the wonder.
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My pronouns are:
he/him
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My Work:
I study how plants grow. A plant cell takes in water, makes its rigid cell wall a little looser, and gets bigger. But it does not break. I want to understand how these processes work together, smoothly.
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I use the root of the plant for most of my work. In the garden, roots grow underground but we can make them grow in the lab so they are easy to see. Not buried. Roots grow really fast, they have a simple, cylindrical shape, and they take up nutrients, and test compounds, really well. Lately, we have been studying how the root grows at warm versus cool temperatures. It turns out that the basic processes of cell division and growth are really sensitive to temperature. We are trying to understand what kind of a thermometer the plant uses to tell its temeperature and then how it adjusts its biology accordingly. You might know that when you are ill, and the cells of your body change by just a few degrees, then you are said to be running a fever, and high fevers, a matter of about 5 degrees, can damage your body quite a lot. Same with five degrees colder which is also really bad news for you. Plant cells change temperature by 10 or 20 degrees and keep right on truckin’. No problem at all. How do they do that?
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My Typical Day:
I eat yogurt for breakfast and I love to do a crossword puzzle. I might do some correspondence (email!) while still at the table. I walk to work and my is taken up with supervising students who work in my lab, teaching Uni students Plant Physiology, working on my computer writing stuff, and on a good day, doing an experiment or two. Eventually I walk back home, have dinner with my wife. Then we might read or watch telly, or both. I really dislike having to work after dinner.
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One of the things I like about my job as a University professor is that the days are varied. Sometimes its teaching stuff: getting lectures ready, lecturing, marking papers, etc. Sometimes reading cool papers and coming up to speed on some new area that suddenly has become relevant. Sometimes it is preparing some sample for its moment under the microscope. Never a dull moment (well there are a few—those committee meetings!).
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Hmm–until I read this question–I did not even know there was any prize money. I think I would host a competition to make a short video that explains a concept related to plant growth. I could ask a bunch of professors I know to be judges and the best one would get the cash.
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Education:
High School: Northampton (Massachusetts)
East Devon College of Further Education, Tiverton (I did Drama)
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (BSc degree in Biophysics)
Stanford University, Stanford California (PhD in Biology)
Post doctoral job 1: University of California Berkeley (I worked on mitosis)
Post doctoral job 2: Australian National University, Canberra (I worked on root growth)
Faculty job 1: Assistent professor, University of Missouri Columbia (I got tenure there and was promoted to Associate prof).
Faculty job 2: Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst (where I remain to this day)
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Qualifications:
No high school credential.
Degrees mentioned in the narrative cv, above.
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Work History:
Besides dropping out of high school, I have always been in school, either as a student, a postdoc, or a prof. However I have done one year fellowships (visiting professor kind of gig) at the National Insitute for Basic Biology (Okazaki Japan), Australian National Uni (Canberra Australia), University of Nottingham (UK), and University of Birmingham (UK)
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Current Job:
See above.
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Employer:
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Microscope-loving botanist
What did you want to be after you left school?
An actor
Were you ever in trouble at school?
I dropped out of high school and hitchhiked across the USA. Trouble out of school you might say.
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
Carpenter or machinist. I like using my hands.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
I don't have favourites. Eliza Carthy (and the whole Waterson Carthy crew) are grand.
What's your favourite food?
See last answer. I love food, pretty much all colors and tastes. Except watermelon, hate that.
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
I'd like to be fluent in Japanese; I'd like to be able sing really well; I'd like to make a super-famous discovery
Tell us a joke.
I replaced my rooster with a duck: Now I wake up at the quack of dawn
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