Lisa Ainsworth is the Research Leader of the USDA ARS Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit and Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her BS in Biology at UCLA and PhD in Crop Sciences from UIUC. Her research addresses crop responses to global atmospheric change and potential solutions to mitigate climate change through agriculture. She has long studied photosynthetic responses of plants to climate change, and her research is broadly integrative, from genetic to agronomic scales. In 2011, she was awarded the President’s Medal from the SEB. In 2019, she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences and was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.