Andrew Leakey

About

Andrew Leakey is the Michael Aiken Chair and Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois, with additional professorships in Crop Sciences, the Center for Digital Agriculture, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) within the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. His academic background includes a B.Sc. (1998) and Ph.D. (2003) from the University of Sheffield, a Fulbright Scholarship at UIUC (2002-2003), and postdoctoral and research fellow positions at the University of Illinois and the Institute for Genomic Biology, respectively. Professor Leakey's research focuses on integrative plant physiology, genetics, and genomics, particularly addressing plant water use efficiency, photosynthesis, and carbon metabolism. His work investigates crop responses to elevated CO2, drought, temperature, and ozone, with an emphasis on crop sustainability and adaptation to global environmental change. His group employs a vertically integrated phenotyping approach combining genetic, molecular, biochemical, physiological, and ecological tools to assess plant performance under both field and controlled conditions. A major focus is understanding the genetic and physiological controls of stomatal patterning and photosynthetic water use efficiency (WUE), utilizing molecular genetics,…

Research topics

• Biology
• Environmental science
• Botany
• Ecology
• Agronomy
• Genetics
• Environmental resource management
• Natural resource economics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Climate change challenges, plant science solutions

  The Plant Cell · 2022 · 189 citations

  Climate change is a defining challenge of the 21st century, and this decade is a critical time for action to mitigate the worst effects on human populations and ecosystems. Plant science can play an important role in developing crops with enhanced resilience to harsh conditions (e.g. heat, drought, salt stress, flooding, disease outbreaks) and engineering efficient carbon-capturing and carbon-sequestering plants. Here, we present examples of research being conducted in these areas and discuss ch…

  PublisherDOI

• Machine learning-enabled phenotyping for GWAS and TWAS of WUE traits in 869 field-grown sorghum accessions

  PLANT PHYSIOLOGY · 2021 · 96 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is a model C4 crop made experimentally tractable by extensive genomic and genetic resources. Biomass sorghum is studied as a feedstock for biofuel and forage. Mechanistic modeling suggests that reducing stomatal conductance (gs) could improve sorghum intrinsic water use efficiency (iWUE) and biomass production. Phenotyping to discover genotype-to-phenotype associations remains a bottleneck in understanding the mechanistic basis for natural variation in gs and iWUE. This…

  DOI

• Nutrient addition increases grassland sensitivity to droughts

  Ecology · 2020 · 77 citations

  Grasslands worldwide are expected to experience an increase in extreme events such as drought, along with simultaneous increases in mineral nutrient inputs as a result of human industrial activities. These changes are likely to interact because elevated nutrient inputs may alter plant diversity and increase the sensitivity to droughts. Dividing a system's sensitivity to drought into resistance to change during the drought and rate of recovery after the drought generates insights into different d…

  DOI

• Optical topometry and machine learning to rapidly phenotype stomatal patterning traits for maize QTL mapping

  PLANT PHYSIOLOGY · 2021 · 75 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Stomata are adjustable pores on leaf surfaces that regulate the tradeoff of CO2 uptake with water vapor loss, thus having critical roles in controlling photosynthetic carbon gain and plant water use. The lack of easy, rapid methods for phenotyping epidermal cell traits have limited discoveries about the genetic basis of stomatal patterning. A high-throughput epidermal cell phenotyping pipeline is presented here and used for quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping in field-grown maize (Zea mays). T…

  DOI

• Light-Stable, Ultrastretchable Wearable Strain Sensors for Versatile Plant Growth Monitoring

  ACS Sensors · 2025-04-30 · 10 citations

  article

  Wearable electronics have been applied to plants for various applications, including microclimate detection, health diagnosis, and growth rate measurement. However, previously reported plant growth strain sensors have limitations in the strain sensing range, optical transparency, and uncertain stability and reproducibility. Our recent work reported a transparent, conjugated polymer-based strain sensor that achieved above 400% operating strain in measurements of growth in a grass. In this work, w…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: RoL-Rules for Dynamic-Light Environmental Sculpting of Genomes

  NSF · $1.2M · 2021–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth A. Ainsworth

  124 shared

• Stephen P. Long

  74 shared

• Donald R. Ort

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  69 shared

• Alistair Rogers

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  63 shared

• Edward S. Buckler

  Cornell University

  58 shared

• Carl J. Bernacchi

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  42 shared

• Patrick J. Brown

  33 shared

• Roberto Lozano

  Ginkgo BioWorks (United States)

  30 shared

Labs

• Andrew Leakey's LaboratoryPI

  The Leakey Lab is a collaborative team from across the globe!

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Scholar (2002-2003)
• Beckman Fellow (2011)
• I.C. Gunsalus Fellow (2013)
• Calvin-Benson Award for Early Career Excellence in Photosynt…
• University Scholar (2017)

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