[1] He was part of the team that is credited with first finding, in 2002, that maize had been domesticated only once, about 9000 years ago, and then spread throughout the Americas.
However, after taking a class by a particularly interesting lecturer, he decided to switch his major to anthropology.
Here he worked with botany professor Hugh Iltis, travelling to Mexico to collect teosinte.
In 1987, Doebley took up the position of professor at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, where his group focused on pinpointing and cloning the principal genes involved in the evolution of maize, such as teosinte branched1,[4] which controls branch number,[5] and teosinte glume architecture, which controls the (lack of) casing on kernels.
[7][8] Doebley’s work has earned him widespread recognition in the field of complex trait genetics, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.