Elizabeth Ainsworth

Elizabeth Anna Ainsworth, commonly known as Lisa Ainsworth, is an American plant physiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who previously worked with the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in its Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit. She is recognized for her experimental studies and quantitative syntheses of how crops respond to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and ozone concentrations, and she leads the university's long-running Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment project, which has shown how changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, ozone, temperature and precipitation affect crop physiology, yield and grain quality. She received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences in 2019 for research showing how crops such as corn and soybeans are affected by rising carbon dioxide and ozone in combination with drought and other environmental stresses.