[3] In 2014, Schnable was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

[1] As of 2023, Schnable had founded three startups, including one breeding new varieties of proso millet for farmers who no longer have enough water to grow corn and one commercializing sensors that measure the amount of nitrate in the stalks of plants.

[1] A significant portion of Schnable's research is focused on forecasting how crops will perform in previously unencountered conditions, including the use of satellites and new sensors to track experiments with many different kinds of corn are growing at remote field locations[1] and developing robots that can replace work plant genetics and breeders currently perform in the field.

[7] In 2022, he led the effort to sequence and annotate the genome of Paspalum vaginatum, another relative of corn whose native range is salty and nutrient poor beaches and which was selected as the official turfgrass of the 2022 World Cup.

[8] Schnable was part of a team of scientists who generated the first complete telomere-to-telomere version of the maize genome.