Pamela Ronald

Pamela Ronald is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California (UC), Davis and an Investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology division and the Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute. She is a faculty affiliate of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. Ronald graduated from Reed College with a BA in Biology, from Stanford University with a MS in Biology, from Uppsala University with a MS in Physiological Botany and from UC Berkeley with a PhD in Molecular and Physiological Plant Biology. She was a postdoctoral fellow in plant breeding at Cornell University and joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1992.

Ronald is recognized for research in infectious disease biology and environmental stress tolerance. Her isolation of the rice Xa21 immune receptor in 1995 and of a novel microbial immunogen in 2015 revealed a new mechanism with which plants and animals detect and respond to infection. She is also known for her leading role in isolation of the rice Submergence Tolerance 1 gene. Her research facilitated the development of high yielding Sub1 rice varieties grown by more than six million subsistence farmers in India and Bangladesh.

Ronald was named a National Geographic Innovator and one of Grist’s 50 innovators who will lead us toward a more sustainable future. She received the USDA National Research Institute Discovery Award, the Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize for Agriculture and Food, and the Tech Award for innovative use of technology to benefit humanity. She was named one of the world’s most influential scientific minds by Thomson Reuters and one of the world’s 100 most influential people in biotechnology by Scientific American. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Invited Member of the French National Academy of Agriculture.

She is coauthor with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, of "Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food." Bill Gates calls the book a "fantastic piece of work" and "important for anyone that wants to learn about the science of seeds and challenges faced by farmers." "Tomorrow’s Table" was selected as one of the 25 most powerful and influential books with the power to inspire college readers to change the world. Her 2015 TED talk has been viewed by 1.7 million people and translated into 26 languages. She founded the UC Davis Interdisciplinary Forum For Science Learning to provide the next generation of scientists with the training they need to become effective communicators. In 2019, she received the American Society of Plant Biologists Leadership Award, an honorary doctorate from the Swedish Agricultural University and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2020 she was named a World Agricultural Prize Laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences. In 2022 Ronald was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and the VinFuture Prize for Women Innovators.