Donald Ort

Donald Ort is the Robert Emerson Professor in Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on understanding and improving plant growth and photosynthetic performance in changing environmental conditions, such as increasing carbon dioxide levels, rising temperatures, and worsening droughts.

Ort’s lab is based at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, where he is the leader of the Genomic Ecology of Global Change research theme that brings together an interdisciplinary group of scientists to create a more robust agricultural system despite climatic changes.

As the director of SoyFACE, which stands for Soybean Free-Air Concentration Experiment, he oversees research in a unique open-air laboratory that investigates the impacts of increasing carbon dioxide and tropospheric ozone, and their interactions with temperature and precipitation, to influence crop systems in the Midwest.

Ort also serves as the deputy director of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), an international research project that is developing staple food crops that turn the sun’s energy into food more efficiently. Currently, he and his team are working to fix a glitch that causes plants to try to fix oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, which hijacks the plant from photosynthesizing. Their shortcut helps plants recover more quickly and get back to fixing carbon, improving productivity by as much as 40%. Read more about this work at https://ripe.illinois.edu/news/the-photosynthesis-fix.

Ort has published more than 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Science, and has been named one of Thomson Reuters’ “Most Influential Scientific Minds.” He has served as president of the International Society of Photosynthesis Research, the International Association of Plant Physiology and the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), who presented him with the Kettering Award. He also served as editor-in-chief of Plant Physiology and associate editor of the Annual Review of Plant Biology. He is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and ASPB. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS); watch his NAS research briefing.

Don earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Wake Forest University and his doctorate in plant biochemistry from Michigan State University.