Next Gen Joseph Swift Saving potatoes, one road trip at a time

Swift enjoyed frequent camping trips with his mother, brother, and geophysicist father. But having a scientist in the family didn’t sway Swift too much—he was more moved by his parents’ adventurous spirits.

“My parents, if anything, encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do. They’re kind of wild, always traveling around and doing adventurous things. They’ve lived in Libya; they’ve lived in Papua New Guinea. That was a lesson to embrace doing something unusual, interesting, or risky.”

That lesson was put into practice when Swift was 15 and his parents decided to move overseas to Salzburg, Austria. Swift deepened his interests in both science and literature while abroad at boarding school, prompting a “toss-up between the two” come university.

Ultimately, Swift decided to enroll in biochemistry and biotechnology classes at The University of New South Wales. However, the coursework leaned heavily toward medical topics, primarily focusing on human biology rather than plant biology.

“At the molecular level, everything is wonderfully beautiful, and there are many similarities between plants and animals,” says Swift. “But once I started research at the bench, I realized that the questions that I really wanted to answer were much more in the plant biology space. To me, there were more interesting and urgent questions around sustainability and agriculture that demanded answering.”

After earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Swift moved to New York City to begin his research in plant genomics—something that, “looking back,” Swift laughs, “I don’t really know if I fully understood before getting into.”

Traditional genetics tries to understand the role of each individual gene and how it is inherited. Genomics takes a much broader view, assessing the expression, interaction, and regulation of all genes to create one cohesive narrative. By looking at a plant’s complete genetic story, patterns begin to emerge that can help explain how plants evolved, how they manage disease, or how they adapt to their environments.

As a PhD student at New York University, Swift studied how nutritional changes can affect a plant’s genome. To take this research to the next level, he moved back to the Pacific shoreline—this time to Salk Professor Joseph Ecker’s lab in San Diego.

“Salk has always been one of—if not the—best place to do plant genomics,” says Swift. “Joe Ecker and other folks here really built that field, so it was a dream to be here. It also allowed me to pursue new projects that were kind of crazy.”

“If we’re able to understand how photosynthesis evolved in certain crops. We could potentially engineer those enhanced photosynthetic properties into other crops, like rice or wheat, that may otherwise struggle in the face of environmental stressors.”

–Joseph Swift

“I’m driving out to Arizona to potato fields to talk with growers, trying to understand what biomarkers they might benefit from, then driving back with a ton of samples in my car to analyze as quickly as possible,” says Swift. “Are they receiving enough nutrients? Is there an early-onset pathogen? These are the sorts of questions that growers really want to understand and know, so they can make decisions about fertilizers or pesticides.”

Advances in genomic technology and artificial intelligence have made Crop Diagnostix’s mission possible. Scientists can now decode genomic datasets from crops more easily than ever. In turn, farmers can more easily access this valuable information and use it to guide their farming practices in real time.

“Everyone wants more predictable and stable yields,” Swift adds, “and we’re all just trying to make those needs a reality in time.”

While he spends most of his time in the laboratory, Swift still makes time to swim, rock climb, and read literature. His schedule is also increasingly shaped by the seasons, thanks to his new connection to farmland.

“There’s this cycle every year around growing, planting, harvesting—all this effort and energy that goes into producing food and energy. It’s a huge undertaking that has happened every year since the dawn of human invention,” says Swift. “Not to get too poetic, but our interaction with plants is one of the most important and fundamental relationships we have with any organism. I can’t see how someone wouldn’t have joy in watching plants grow.”