Lisa Ainsworth

A highly influential researcher, Ainsworth was ranked in the top 1% by citations for her field in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022.

Early life and education Ainsworth grew up in small town Illinois, United States where she worked for her family's seed corn company. Ainsworth earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. Here she became interested in plant sciences and ecology, and spent two semesters completing field work in Costa Rica and Thailand. before spending a year as a Humboldt Fellow at Juelich Research Center.

Research and career Ainsworth is a professor of Crop Sciences and of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Previously, she was a plant physiologist at the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service with the Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit. Her research was among the first to make use of biochemical and genomic tools to establish the mechanisms by which plants respond to climate change. In particular, Ainsworth studies how rising levels of carbon dioxide and ground level ozone impact crop production. At the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Ainsworth is a lead investigator of SoyFACE (Free Air Concentration Enrichment). As part of SoyFACE Ainsworth leads an open-air laboratory that allows her to grow plants in atmospheric conditions that are similar to those predicted to be present in 2050. These experiments provide critical ground-truth data for models of future crop productivity and food security. She showed that during the 2010s a large proportion of the United States soybean and corn harvest has been lost to ozone pollution. In 2011 Ainsworth identified that future levels of ground-level ozone could reduce the yields of soybeans by almost one quarter by 2050. She has led summer camps for high school girls (Pollen Power) to teach young people about plant science and the Earth's future climate.

Awards and honours Her awards and honours include:

2009 USDA ARS Midwest Area Early Career Research Scientist of the Year 2011 Society for Experimental Biology President's Medal 2012 American Society of Plant Biologists Charles Albert Shull Award 2012 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign University Scholar 2015 United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service Diversity & Equal Opportunity Award 2018 Crop Science Society of America Presidential Award 2019 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2020 Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences