Our Team

Dr. Pamela Ronald

Dr. Pamela Ronald is a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at University of California, Davis. She also serves as the director of grass genetics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Emeryville, California, and as the faculty director of the UC Davis Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy.

Her laboratory studies the genetic basis of resistance to disease and tolerance to stress in rice. Together with her collaborators, she has engineered rice for resistance to disease and tolerance to flooding, which seriously threaten rice crops in Asia and Africa.

Dr. Ronald and her colleagues received the USDA 2008 National Research Initiative Discovery Award for their work on rice submergence tolerance. She has also been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Award, the Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize for Agriculture and Food, and the Tech Award for innovative use of technology to benefit humanity.

Dr. Ronald has been published in a number of national and international media outlets and is a blogger for Scientific American’s “Food Matters” blog. She is a co-founder of Biology Fortified Inc., an independent educational non-profit organization, and co-authored “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food” with her husband, Raoul Adamchak.