Faculty Profile: Dr. Bruce McClure
Most people don’t think much about plant mating, but Bruce McClure does. So to an unsuspecting passerby, a conversation with McClure, Professor of Biochemistry and member of MU’s Interdisciplinary Plant Group, may sound very, very strange.
“My lab focuses on mechanisms controlling plant mating,” he said. “One type of mechanism allows plants to recognize the pollen of individuals so closely related that mating would lead to inbreeding depression. The other allows recognition and rejection of pollen from other species.”
“It’s analogous to mating in animal species such as humans, in which mating between siblings, between parents and offspring, and with other species is prevented,” said McClure. The difference is plants don’t prevent inbreeding through a social mechanism, like a taboo. They do it through a biochemical mechanism.”
McClure has been working in the area of pollen-pistil recognition since 1988. But he wasn’t always sure that he wanted to study plant mating. “I had an interest in biochemical mechanisms when I was fairly young, but I didn’t know those terms,” he said. “I guess I sort of drifted around in interest and eventually came back to that.”
The New Jersey native completed his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at the University of Minnesota, where he also received his doctorate. He began his research on pollen-pistil recognition in Melbourne, Australia, where he did postdoctoral work for four years before he joined the faculty in the Division of Biochemistry at MU in April of 1992.
Like many professors, McClure cites working with students as the best part of his job. “I love to teach,” he said, adding, “I also get a lot of satisfaction out of figuring out the little puzzles in pollen-pistil interactions.”
As a STRIDE committee member of Mizzou ADVANCE, McClure has been involved in getting scientists like himself to ask other types of questions about the world around them. The STRIDE committee is primarily responsible for disseminating information awareness about practices related to advancement of women, and McClure said the committee has been hard at work asking questions about gender equity in science at MU.
“We are working on developing strategies to educate different groups on campus about the current situation of women in science at MU and nationally, and about the personal and social factors that can contribute to gender disparities in science,” he says.
In order to do this, the committee has discussed the social science literature on gender equity, talked about the policies and procedures in the different departments and divisions represented by the committee, and looked at data on gender in science at MU.
Having been a longtime faculty member at MU, McClure knew from experience that representation of women in leadership positions at the university is low. How low, however, was a bit of a surprise. “I knew the numbers were low, but not that low,” he says. “You can practically count the number of full professors in science who are women on two hands!”
He sees the current gender disparity at MU primarily as a numbers problem. “The institutional data from MU shows that women and men advance at the same rate at both the assistant and associate levels. The problem is that there just aren’t enough women.”
He continues, “Data from national sources show that women are closing or have already closed the gender gap at the doctorate levels in most science fields. Why women are less likely to be hired as assistant professors is the question we need to ask. Are women choosing not to go into academia, or are they choosing to go into academia but not being hired? In the eventuality that the second is true, one of our goals is to educate ourselves and our colleagues who sit on promotion and tenure committees about forms of gender bias, particularly in the hiring process.”
He also says that we need to pay special attention to retaining female faculty since the absolute numbers of women are so much smaller than the number of men. However, the proportions will only change if we expand the pipeline.
McClure got involved in Mizzou ADVANCE when Meera Chandrasekhar, Professor of Astronomy and Physics, asked him to join the STRIDE committee. He was already aware of the program at the time because his wife, Melody Kroll, helped write the grant proposal that brought Mizzou ADVANCE to MU.
Collegial and familial ties aside, McClure’s decision to join the STRIDE committee was ultimately a personal choice. “It’s a question of fairness and valuing diversity,” he said.
And that is a sentence that even a random passerby would appreciate.
For more information on Bruce McClure's research, visit http://ipg.missouri.edu/bmcclure.php.