Lisa Ainsworth
Lisa Ainsworth is the Charles Adlai Ewing Chair of Crop Physiology in the Department of Crop Sciences and the Department of Plant Biology. She is plant physiologist by training and directs the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment (SoyFACE) facility, the longest running open-air experiment for studying crop responses to global atmospheric change, including rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and ozone pollution. Her research addresses crop responses to climate change and tests potential solutions for mitigation of climate change through agriculture. She has long studied photosynthetic responses of plants to changes in atmospheric composition, and her research is broadly integrative, from genetic to agronomic scales. She tests genetic variation in crop responses to atmospheric change and identifies the molecular mechanisms conferring ozone tolerance in crops and greater responsiveness to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
Lisa 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 United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit. She has been an editor for seven peer reviewed journals, currently serving on the editorial boards of Plant, Cell & Environment and Science Advances. Lisa has held leadership positions in the American Society of Plant Biologists, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Foundation and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. She is a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Sciences, was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences in 2019, and was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.