Pamela C. Ronald

Pamela Ronald is Distinguished Professor in the Dept of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis; a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, a faculty scientist in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; a Key Scientist at the Joint BioEnergy Institute; and a faculty affiliate of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. She is recognized for trailblazing research and techniques used to understand the plant response to infection and tolerance to environmental stress. 

Her research led to the isolation of the XA21 immune receptor and facilitated the development of high yielding Sub1 rice varieties grown by more than six million subsistence farmers in India and Bangladesh. She is co-authored the widely read Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food, among other works. Her awards include the American Society of Plant Biologists Leadership Award, the Wolf Prize in Agriculture, a National Geographic Innovator award, and a USDA National Research Institute Award. 

Ronald graduated completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, and earned an M.S. from Stanford University, an M.S. from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and a B.S. from Reed College.