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Settles completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Delaware, including an honors thesis in biological sciences in 1993. He completed his doctorate in genetics in a joint program at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. For his dissertation, he established the role of a key component to a novel protein secretion pathway found in plants and bacteria. The research was published in 1997 as a cover article in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Settles came to UF in 1999 to conduct post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Donald McCarty in the horticultural sciences department.
During his post-doctoral research, Settles and McCarty established genetic and molecular tools for analysis of maize seed mutants. The work laid the foundation for a recent $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct functional genomics research on maize seed mutants.
Settles was recently appointed a co-investigator on the collaborative grant, which includes McCarty, Curtis Hannah and Karen Koch at UF. Hannah and Koch are professors in the horticultural sciences department. Settles is focusing on a class of seed mutants known as rough endosperm mutants.