Joshua’s hometown is Ithaca, NY and is currently a student at Ithaca High School. Joshua is working in the McCouch lab with post doc, Mike Thomson. His project works to identify candidate genes responsible for flowering time in rice plants. For this project, Joshua uses publicly available rice genome sequence to design primers for amplifying genes and other DNA sequences. He then tests those primers in the lab using PCR, and agarose gel electrophoresis.