Pamela Ronald

Education

Ronald received a B.A. from Reed College, an M.A. from Stanford University, an M.S. from Uppsala University, Sweden and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1990. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University from 1990–1992. In 1992, Ronald joined UC Davis as a faculty member where she served as Faculty Assistant to the Provost from 2004–2007. From 2003–2007 Ronald chaired the UC Davis Distinguished Women in Science seminar series, an event designed to support women's professional advancement in the sciences. In 1996, Ronald founded the Genetic Resources Recognition Fund (GRRF), a UC Davis program to share benefits of biotechnology with less developed countries.

Pattern Recognition Receptor-mediated Immunity

The Ronald laboratory studies the innate immune response, using the host organism rice and the agriculturally important pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo). 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 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. The significance of these discoveries was highlighted by the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Jules Hoffman and Bruce Beutler, (jointly with Ralph Steinman), for their discoveries of the fly and mice receptors. In 2015, Ronald and team isolated the predicted ligand of XA21, a sulfated peptide named RaxX.

Tolerance to Abiotic Stress

In 1996, Ronald began a project with rice breeder David Mackill who had recently demonstrated that tolerance to complete submergence mapped to the Submergence tolerance 1 (Sub1) Quantitative trait locus (QTL). In 1997, the USDA awarded Ronald and Mackill a grant to isolate the Sub1 locus. Ronald’s laboratory led the positional cloning of the Sub1 QTL, revealed that it carried three ethylene response transcription factors (ERF) and demonstrated that one of the ERFs, which she designated Sub1A, was upregulated rapidly in response to submergence and conferred robust tolerance to submergence in transgenic plants . This work revealed an important mechanism with which plants control tolerance to abiotic stress and set the stage for in-depth molecular-genetic analyses of Sub1A-mediated processes with her collaborator Julia Bailey-Serres, who joined the project in 2003. Mackill’s team at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) generated and released several Sub1A varieties (developed through marker-assisted breeding) in seven countries including India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, where submergence destroys four million tons of rice each year, enough to feed 30 million people. In 2012, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Sub1 rice has reached over four million farmers.

Paper retraction controversy

In 2013, Ronald retracted two scientific papers. Retraction watch, a website that shines light on problems with papers and educates and celebrates research ethics and good practices noted, "that this was a case of scientists doing the right thing". In a blog post at Scientific American, Ronald describes the 18-month process behind the retraction. As part of a story about the importance of setting the record straight, in 2014, Nature magazine covered the Ronald retraction. In 2015, Ronald published the discovery of the predicted ligand to XA21, called RaxX, bringing the research team full circle in correcting their mistakes.

Public Engagement

Ronald co-authored the book "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food" with her husband, Raoul Adamchak. Tomorrow's Table was selected as one of the best books of 2008 by Seed Magazine and the Library Journal.

Ronald has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Forbes Magazine, Scientific American, The Harvard International Review, The Economist, the Boston review and MIT technology review.

Ronald has worked towards recognizing the source nations and institutes that have contributed to making possible important scientific advances. In 1996, Ronald set up the Genetic Resources Recognition Fund (GRRF) at UC Davis. Some of the royalties derived from the licensing of academic discoveries using materials from developing countries can be used to fund fellowships, land conservation efforts, or other projects that will benefit the developing nation partner.

Awards and achievements

Ronald is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was awarded Fulbright (1984, 2012), Guggenheim (2000), and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)(2008) Fellowships. She and her colleagues were recipients of the USDA 2008 National Research Initiative Discovery Award for their work on submergence tolerant rice. In 2009, they were finalists for the World Technology Award for Environment. In 2009, Ronald received the National Association of Science Writers in Society Journalism Award and was nominated for the Biotech Humanitarian Award. In 2011, Ronald was selected to be the Charles Valentine Riley lecturer, an annual event cosponsored by the AAAS and the World Food Prize Foundation. In 2011, Ronald was selected as one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company Magazine. In 2012, Ronald was awarded the Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize for Agriculture and Food. In 2012, Ronald, Mackill and postdoctoral fellow Xu received the Tech Award 2012 for innovative use of technology to benefit humanity. In 2015 Ronald was selected by Scientific American as one of the Worldview 100—a list of the world’s 100 most influential people in biotechnology.

Chronological list of honors

Personal life

Ronald is the daughter of Patricia and Robert Ronald (Ne' Rosenthal). Her father Robert, a Jewish refugee, wrote a memoir entitled "Last Train to Freedom".

From the age of 12, Ronald spent each summer backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Wilderness where she developed a love for plant biology. As a college student at Reed she became intrigued by the interactions of plants with other organisms and for her senior thesis, studied the recolonization of Mt. St Helens, where Helen Stafford (1922–2011) was her thesis advisor.

Between 1961 and 1978, Ronald lived in San Mateo, California. She received her bachelor's degree from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She carried out her graduate work at Stanford University, Uppsala University, Sweden and The University of California, Berkeley.

As a Fulbright Scholar in Sweden she studied how plants interact with mycorrhizal fungi with Nils Fries and as a graduate student began to study plant-bacterial interactions in the laboratory of Brian Staskawicz. She carried out her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Steven Tanksley at Cornell University.

In 1996 she married Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer. They have two children, Cliff and Audrey.

The song "Sierra Bound" by Rita Hosking from her 2013 CD Little Boat is about Ronald.