[3] As an undergraduate she accompanied a professor to the Botanical Garden in St. Louis which convinced her to study plant biology.

[6] After completing her postdoc she was hired as a principal investigator at the USDA Plant Gene Expression Center in Albany, CA.

She currently serves as the director for the center and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

[5][1] Postdocs working in her lab have gone on to clone other genes controlling maize development including terminal ear1,[7] barren inflorescence2,[8] fasciated ear2,[9] tangled,[10] and indeterminate spikelet1.

[5] Since she was a postdoc at UC-Berkeley, Hake and her family live on the Gospel Flat Farm near Bolinas, California.