James L. Starr
James L. Starr was born in southwestern Ohio and grew up on a hog and corn farm. After graduating from high school, he attended Wilmington College in his home town and Morehead State University in eastern Kentucky before transferring to Ohio State University, where he earned his B.S. (1971) and M.S. (1972) degrees in
Plant Pathology. Dr. Starr completed his Ph. D. degree at Cornell University (1976) under the direction of W. F. Mai.
Starr then moved to North Carolina State University as a post-doctoral research associate, working
with J. N. Sasser in the International Meloidogyne Project. During his tenure with the International Meloidogyne Project, Dr. Starr was temporarily assigned to the International Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India as a visiting nematologist.
After returning from India in 1979, Starr accepted a position with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture in
charge of their Nematode Advisory Laboratory. Starr moved to the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at Texas A&M University in 1981, rising to the rank of Professor in 1993.
Dr. Starr's research interests have been varied, but have centered primarily on the biology and management of root-knot species, especially on cotton and peanut. He has documented the frequency distributions of Meloidogyne species in Texas, developed models of winter survival that compare the relative role of eggs and J2,
characterized the damage functions for
M. incognita and M. arenaria on cotton and peanut, respectively, and has determined the impact of host resistance and disease complexes with several fungal pathogens on these damage functions.
Recently, Starr and his colleagues were able to successfully introgress resistance to M. arenaria and M. javanica from wild Arachis species into cultivated peanut, leading to the release of the first nematode-resistant peanut cultivars, and develop an effective marker assisted selection system. In similar efforts with cotton, Starr has collaborated with plant breeders to develop advanced generation cotton germplasm lines with resistance to M. incognita and is currently working to introgress resistance to Rotylenchulus reniformis from Gossypium barbadense into cultivated cotton that also is resistant to M. incognita.
In more basic research areas, Starr has collaborated in efforts to characterize the esophageal gland secretions of
Meloidogyne species and to characterize the nuclear condition of nematode-induced giant cells. This latter research has recently demonstrated that the numbers of nuclei per giant cell can be reduced by nearly half
and yet have no effect on rate of nematode development.
Dr. Starr has authored over 100 publications, including 70 journal articles, and was co-editor of the recent text "Plant Resistance to Parasitic Nematodes."
In addition to the Society of Nematologists, Dr. Starr is a member of the American Phytopathological Society, the
American Peanut Research and Education Society, the Cotton Disease Council, and the Organization of Nematologists of Tropical America. He has worked to advance the science of nematology by serving as a senior editor for APS Press, Plant Health Progress, and Nematology (formerly Fundamental & Applied Nematology).
Starr's service to the Society of Nematologists includes serving on numerous standing and ad hoc committees, serving multiple terms on the editorial board of the Journal of Nematology (including Editor-in-Chief), and in
the elected offices of Vice-President, President-Elect, and President. Starr also served as the Vice-Chair for the N. A. Cobb Foundation and helped to initiate the fund raising activities of that organization.
Dr. James Starr was elected Fellow of the Society on Nematologists in 2003.