Growing up in Temple, Texas, Julie Howe, Ph.D., loved to learn. At school, she was a dedicated student. At home, curiosity ruled her mind. She was especially interested in all things related to the environment.
Now, Howe is a professor and assistant department head in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University. But it wasn’t until college that she realized she wanted to pursue science at all.
“I wanted to solve problems. I thought, as lots of high school kids do, that engineering is how you solve problems,” Howe said.
So, she entered Texas A&M as an engineering major. Howe quickly realized that it wasn’t for her, as she found the classes boring, and felt like she was building solutions without understanding the problems first.
Then, one day, she met with her advisor.
“I was just finding my classes really boring because it was lots of math and not learning concepts,” Howe said. “I talked to him, and he said, ‘You know, you sound like a scientist, not an engineer.’ I thought, ‘light bulb, you’re right.’ So, I immediately changed my major to bioenvironmental sciences.”
Finding soil science
In environmental science, she excelled. She found classes interesting and had fun learning again. Howe was able to take a wide range of science classes that catered to her broad interests.
But there was one particular class she was not excited about: soil science.
“I didn’t want to take soil science. I had no interest in it. I heard it was hard when I changed my major. I was like, well, I guess I’ll get this out of the way,” Howe said. “Then I thought, why do people think this is hard? This isn’t hard; it’s really interesting. I was baffled by that. It was like all of science in one class. I like all science classes, so combining them all in one thing was pretty cool, I thought.”
She soon joined the horticulture club, which managed two greenhouses, and also worked in a lab.
“I worked for a plant cytogeneticist, so I would look at pollen and genes,” Howe said. “I helped keep their plants in the greenhouse and the field. I love plants. I love gardening. So, it wasn’t a big stretch for me.”
Studying soil and water in graduate school
Then came the time to decide where to go after graduation. She knew she wanted to pursue graduate school, but what would she study?
Despite loving her lab work, Howe knew she didn’t want to focus on plant cytogenetics for her master’s degree.
“I really was fascinated by plant uptake of metal contaminants. I was interested in how plants regulate water and nutrients and how that all works together to clean up the soil,” Howe said.
When she shared these interests with her boss, he took her upstairs to the office of Dr. Leoppert. She joined his lab and researched chromium speciation and uptake in plants throughout her master’s degree at Texas A&M.
For her doctoral studies, Howe moved to the Midwest. At the University of Wisconsin – Madison, she researched soil, metals, organic matter, and water relationships. She made another big move after graduation and accepted a faculty position at Auburn University.
During her 10 years at Auburn, her hard work resulted in recognition from her students. In 2016, she was awarded a Women in Science Mentoring Award.
“An undergraduate student found out about this award and got my entire lab group to support a nomination for it for me,” she said. “He passed away before he learned that I won. That is the award that is the most meaningful to me because it came from my students.”
Research at Texas A&M: climate, outer space and soils
As a third generation only child, Howe felt called to come home when her parents started getting older. This drew her back to Texas A&M, where she has now worked for almost 10 years.
Today her responsibilities as a professor and assistant department head keep her very busy. She teaches two classes, gives guest lectures, oversees eight graduate students’ research, and conducts her own research projects.
One notable project she has worked on at Texas A&M is the Texas Conservation and Sustainability Initiative. As principal investigator, Howe led the project to improve resilience to weather extremes and increase adoption of practices to improve sustainability of commodity-producing lands in Texas and help mitigate climate change.
Sending plants to space
Howe also recently had the opportunity to work with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Starbase Brewing to send plants to the International Space Station (ISS). The barley plants were grown in simulated Martian soil modified by adding used brewer’s grain, she said.
The results showed that the plants germinated and grew, although slightly less than they might have on Earth. Results are still being processed, but a replicated experiment on Earth showed differences in nutrient uptake and root exudation.
She is now working with students from the Texas A&M College of Engineering on preliminary work for a proposal to develop growth chambers to send plants to the ISS for 6 months next year.
Sending plants to space brought up many challenges, Howe said. One challenge was watering the plants and managing appropriate gas exchanges.
Without gravity, typical watering methods wouldn’t work, and closed systems required careful consideration of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange. The team realized that capillary action should still work in space. So, they added capillary wicks to water the plants.
Advice for college students
To students in any field, Howe’s advice is to get involved. Working in a lab, joining a club or doing both can provide valuable experience, she said.
“Be active. Get to know your faculty members,” she said. “Work in labs, even if you don’t think it’s the best experience. Go take that job anyway, because sometimes finding out what you don’t want to do is just as good as finding out what you do.”
For Howe, deciding what career to pursue was very difficult because of her diverse interests. Finding out what she didn’t want to do brought her to where she is now, she said.
In the end, Howe said choosing a career boiled down to her lifelong goal of protecting the environment. She gets to do just that in soil science at Texas A&M.
“At the heart of everything I do is trying to protect the environment, whether it be water resources or soil contamination, recycling waste or reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Howe said.
