Elizabeth (Lisa) Ainsworth is a Professor and the C.A. Ewing Chair of Crop Physiology in the Departments of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and interim director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. She spent two decades with the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit, most recently as research leader, before joining the Illinois faculty. Her research examines how rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, ozone, and other global change factors affect crop physiology, yield, and grain quality, including at the SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) field facility she leads. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Lili Cai is an Associate Professor of Forest Biomaterials at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. Her research program explores innovative approaches to wood protection, bio-based composites, biomass valorization, and the development of sustainable products for the built environment. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, she seeks to develop resilient and environmentally responsible materials that support economic development and climate-smart solutions, and she is active in teaching and mentoring students in forest biomaterials and sustainable bioeconomy systems. At UGA, Dr. Cai is particularly interested in building connections among plant science, biomass production, and materials innovation to create new opportunities for transforming plant-based resources into high-value products and technologies with real-world impact.

Quentin Dudley is the Hunt-Hougen Assistant Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his research group builds tools for cell-free and plant-based bioproduction of molecules. He completed his Ph.D. in the lab of Michael Jewett at Northwestern University, where he developed an in vitro prototyping platform for assembling and optimizing multi-step enzyme pathways. As a postdoc at the Earlham Institute / John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, under the joint mentorship of Nicola Patron and Sarah O’Connor, he used CRISPR-Cas9-based genome engineering to improve the wild tobacco Nicotiana benthamiana as a chassis for the bioproduction of medicinal proteins and metabolites. Prior to starting his role at UW, he worked in industry with the crop genome editing company Calyxt to engineer bioreactor-based plant cells that produce cosmetic, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical ingredients, and spent time at Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit research funding organization.

Aziz Ebrahimi is an Assistant Professor of Forest Genetics, Genomics, and Tree Breeding at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. His research integrates genomics, multi-omics, plant physiology, high-throughput phenotyping, remote sensing, and machine learning to understand the genetic variation underlying plant adaptation, productivity, and resilience. His work spans walnut and other forest tree systems, with applications in predictive breeding, conservation, and climate-resilient forest management.

Dr. Erica Goss is a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. She began working on plant pathogens at the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution in 2005, and completed postdoctoral training at the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Corvallis, Oregon, before joining the UF faculty in 2011. Her research uses genetic data to understand the evolutionary history, population diversity, and ecological communities of plant pathogens and plant-associated microbes, with the long-term goal of understanding what drives destructive pathogens to emerge and succeed in new environments and hosts. Her current projects use fungal, oomycete, and bacterial genomic data to survey and monitor pathogen host range and population shifts. She received a University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship for 2023–2026 and the American Phytopathological Society’s Syngenta Award in 2022.

Michael Grome is a new Assistant Professor in the Plant Biology Department with research experience in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and plant transformation. His work adapts bacterial tools of genetic code expansion to plant plastids to enable agricultural bioproduction of proteins with unnatural chemistries, using algal systems as intermediate platforms for tool development.

Dr. Annie Hatmaker is an evolutionary biologist who studies how pathogenicity evolves in fungal pathogens using genomics, bioinformatics, and machine learning. Her lab is interested in how fungi evolve to infect plants and humans, with a particular emphasis on the plant and human pathogen Aspergillus flavus and related species. She recently joined UGA as an Assistant Professor of Fungal Biology/Mycology in the Department of Plant Pathology, after earning her B.S. and M.S. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, with postdoctoral training completed jointly at the USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Laboratory and the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Massimo Iorizzo is a Professor and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University and Associate Director of the Plants for Human Health Institute. His research program focuses on comparative structural genomics and genetics for traits associated with enhanced quality characteristics, including bioactives, in crops such as carrot, blueberry, cranberry, spinach, pineapple, and banana. Since 2010, his research has helped establish the largest set of omics tools for these crops and elucidated the genetic mechanisms controlling nutrient and bioactive accumulation, such as carotenoids and anthocyanins. Through interdisciplinary collaborative research, he has opened a new field connecting plant genetics and breeding to nutrigenomic properties, and he directs several large, international, multidisciplinary projects in blueberry, cranberry, and carrot that advance molecular breeding. Before joining NC State, he was a Research Scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, following a Ph.D. at the University of Naples Federico II and a visiting scientist appointment at the University of Minnesota.

Tao Wan is a Principal Investigator at the Wuhan Botanical Garden and the Sino-Africa Joint Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and earned a Ph.D. from Wuhan University. Research in the Wan lab explores the drivers of plant evolution — from decoding the history written in seed plant genomes to revealing the molecular mechanisms of adaptation — and extends to understanding the formation of floral diversity patterns, the genetic foundations of ecological fitness, and the sustainable use and protection of plant resources in East Africa and Madagascar. This work has appeared in journals including Nature, Nature Plants, Nature Communications, and Current Biology.