Pamela Ronald

As a student at Reed College with Helen Stafford (1922–2011), Ronald became intrigued by the interactions of plants with other organisms.

For her senior thesis, she studied the recolonization of Mount St. Helens.

Pamela Christine Ronald (born January 29, 1961) is an American plant pathologist and geneticist.

She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California.

Pamela Christine Ronald was born on January 29, 1961, to Patricia (née Fobes) and Robert Ronald of San Mateo, California.

Robert Ronald, a Jewish refugee who was born Robert Rosenthal, wrote a memoir entitled Last Train to Freedom.

From an early age, Ronald spent time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada wilderness, sparking her love for plant biology.

Ronald realized that analyzing and studying plants could be a profession after witnessing botanists in the field during a summer time hike with her brother.

She already knew she loved plants after time spent helping her mother tend to them in the garden.

This work resulted in part from the identification of a blight-resistant rice strain from Mali, Oryza longistaminata, in the late 1970s.

The strain was studied and bred at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines.

Ronald's group subsequently mapped, sequenced, and cloned the Xa21 gene from this rice strain.

When US patent 5859339 was granted to the University of California for the XA21 gene, Ronald and law professor John Barton established a benefit-sharing model for the source countries of genetically important plant varieties called the Genetic Resources Recognition Fund.

Ronald also launched a project with CGIAR to allow noncommercial use of the gene for nonprofit purposes and released the gene to IRRI for the development of rice strains to be grown in developing nations.

Ronald received a B.A. in Biology from Reed College in 1982.

She went on to earn an M.A. in Biology from Stanford University in 1984 and an M.S. from Uppsala University, Sweden in plant physiology in 1985.

As a Fulbright Scholar in Sweden with Nils Fries, she studied how plants interact with mycorrhizal fungi.

As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she began to study plant-bacterial interactions in the laboratory of Brian Staskawicz, working with peppers and tomatoes.

Because rice is the most important food staple in the world, she switched her studies to rice, hoping to contribute to the well-being of farmers in impoverished regions of the world.

She received her Ph.D. in molecular and physiological plant biology in 1990.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University from 1990 to 1992 in the laboratory of Steven Tanksley.

In the 1990s, through conversations with rice geneticist Gurdev Khush, Ronald became interested in the rice XA21 genetic locus, which conferred broad-spectrum resistance to Xoo.

She hypothesized that Xa21 encoded a single protein that recognized a conserved microbial determinant.

In 1992, Ronald joined UC Davis as a faculty member.

In 1995, the Ronald laboratory isolated and characterized the rice XA21 pattern recognition receptor.

Subsequent discoveries in flies, humans, mice, and Arabidopsis revealed that animals and other plant species also carry membrane-anchored receptors with striking structural similarities to XA21 and that these receptors also play key roles in the immune response.

In 1996 she married Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer.

They have two children, Cliff and Audrey.

From 2003 to 2007 Ronald chaired the UC Davis Distinguished Women in Science seminar series, an event designed to support women's professional advancement in the sciences.

She served as Faculty Assistant to the Provost from 2004 to 2007.

Ronald is a vocal advocate for science and for sustainable agriculture.

Her laboratory has been instrumental in the development of rice that is disease-resistant and flood-tolerant.

The Ronald laboratory studies the innate immune response, using the host organism rice and the agriculturally important pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo).

In 2009 and 2011, Ronald's laboratory reported on the discovery of a bacterial protein that they believed was the activator of Xa21-mediated immunity.

These reports were described by ScienceWatch as "hot" and "highly cited".

For their discoveries of the fly and mice receptors, Jules Hoffman and Bruce Beutler received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (jointly with Ralph Steinman), indicating the importance of such research.

In 2018 she served as a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Her laboratory has genetically engineered rice for resistance to diseases and tolerance to flooding, which are serious problems of rice crops in Asia and Africa.

Ronald's research has been published in Science, Nature and other leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, and has also been featured in The New York Times, Organic Gardening Magazine, Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Progressive Farmer, CNN, Discover Magazine, The Scientist, Popular Mechanics, Bill Gates blog, National Public Radio and National Geographic.