Feeding the World: Engineering Rice for Changing Climate

Climate change is placing unprecedented pressure on the crops that feed the world, altering patterns of disease, flooding, and drought in ways that threaten global food security. Professor Pamela Ronald, a leader in plant genetics research at UC Davis, will describe her research identifying the genes that allow crops to withstand disease and environmental stress, including her discovery of the flood-tolerant Sub1 rice variety now grown by millions of smallholder farmers across Asia. Her talk will explore the science behind climate-resilient agriculture, efforts to reduce agriculture's environmental footprint, and will offer her perspective on genetics, sustainability, and the future of food.

Pamela C. Ronald is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. She is recognized for her research on plant genes controlling disease resistance and stress tolerance, with a focus on climate-resilient agriculture and global food security. Ronald’s team isolated the rice XA21 resistance gene and co-developed the Sub1 flood-tolerant rice variety, now grown by more than six million smallholder farmers in South and Southeast Asia.

Elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2019, Professor Ronald also serves as an investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and is a faculty affiliate of Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment.

She is active in public science communication both as a co-author of “Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food” and as the founder of the UC Davis Interdisciplinary Forum for Advancing Science Learning. Her honors include the USDA National Research Initiative Discovery Award (2008), the Tech Award (2012) for innovative use of technology to benefit humanity, the ASPB Leadership in Science Public Service Award (2019), the GCHERA World Agriculture Prize (2020), the Wolf Prize in Agriculture (2022), the VinFuture Prize for Women Innovators (2022), The President’s Award for the Advancement of the Common Good, Stanford University (2025), and the Universitas 21 Award for Climate Action (2026).