Lisa Ainsworth, IGB Interim Director
As a plant physiologist, I apply physiological, biochemical, and genomic tools to understand the mechanisms of plant responses to global environmental changes, including rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and increasing ozone pollution.
Global changes in climate and atmospheric composition pose significant challenges to maintaining and improving future agricultural production and global food supply. Two global changes that directly affect crop productivity are rising carbon dioxide concentration and rising tropospheric ozone concentration. While elevated carbon dioxide stimulates photosynthesis and productivity of crops, rising tropospheric ozone negatively impacts photosynthesis and subsequent growth and production.
The focus of my research is to understand and integrate the genetic, molecular, biochemical and physiological responses of plants to global change. This fundamental understanding is critical for identifying targets for breeding and biotechnology that may be exploited to maximize crop yields and plant productivity in the coming decades. As the population grows and the climate becomes more variable over this century, addressing these research challenges will be ever more important. We aim to better understand and address crop responses to global climate change by using meta-analyses to quantify the responses of plants to climate change factors, developing high-throughput tools for investigating molecular, biochemical and physiological responses of plants to climate change, and identifying the genes and loci underpinning intraspecific variation in the response of species to climate change.
The ultimate aim of my research is to provide fundamental knowledge that will enable crop production to be maximized in a future world of elevated carbon dioxide concentration, elevated ozone concentration, higher temperatures and greater probability of drought stress.
Lisa Ainsworth
IGB Interim Director
- Biography
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Lisa Ainsworth is the Charles Adlai Ewing Chair of Crop Physiology in the Department of Crop Sciences and the Department of Plant Biology. She received her BS in Biology at UCLA, PhD in Crop Sciences from the University of Illinois, and was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Germany. Before joining the University of Illinois faculty in October 2024, Lisa was the Research Leader for the USDA Agricultural Research Service Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit. Her research addresses crop responses to climate change and tests potential solutions for mitigation of climate change through agriculture. Lisa has held leadership positions in the American Society of Plant Biologists and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. She is a fellow of AAAS, received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences in 2019, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
- Ainsworth Lab - Photosynthesis and Crop Responses to Global Change
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With ~12.6% of the global land surface covered by croplands, the scale of the challenge and opportunity for adapting agriculture to global atmospheric change is vast. We study solutions to this challenge across scales, from identifying genes and adapting germplasm to atmospheric change, to measuring and improving photosynthesis, to testing mitigation strategies for reducing greenhouse gases from agricultural systems. Our lab is a team of creative and dedicated scientists who work together to address the grand challenge of adapting agriculture to global change.