Lisa Ainsworth, IGB Interim Director
As a plant physiologist, I apply physiological, biochemical, and genomic tools to study photosynthesis, the primary source of energy for life on Earth. Photosynthesis is the pulse of the planet, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during the Northern Hemisphere summer growing season, and returning it during the winter.
The process of photosynthesis drives the global carbon cycle and fundamentally determines the productivity of the world’s forests and the provision of the global food, feed and fuel supply. My research aims to understand how photosynthesis responds to the battery of challenges to plant growth including rising temperatures, changes to atmospheric composition, and more variable rainfall that intensifies flooding and drought. From that understanding, we build, design and test genetic strategies to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in crops. We then test those designs in innovative, experimental field facilities.
As the success of the genomics revolution shifted the bottleneck in crop improvement to “phenotyping”, i.e., measuring and analyzing the observable traits of a plant, there have been new advances in imaging from cells to satellites. These advances are supported by new machine learning and AI capabilities. Together, these provide an incredible tool-kit for accelerating crop improvement. By combining these tools, our research aims to improve the sustainability and productivity of today’s and tomorrow’s crops.
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.