Dr. Courtney Leisner

B.Sc. The College of William and Mary (2007)
M.Sc. Washington State University (2009)
Ph.D. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2014)
NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship, Michigan State (2015-2018)
Assistant Professor, Auburn University (2018)

Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech (2023-present)

I joined the faculty at Auburn University in 2018 in the Department of Biological Sciences. In 2023 I moved the lab to the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech. My research group works to understand plant responses to their environment, with an emphasis on abiotic stress imposed by future climate change and their impacts on plant nutritional quality in diverse cropping systems. The overarching theme of my research program is to investigate how our changing climate and associated annual weather patterns impact our ability to produce a sufficient quantity of nutritious food for a growing world population. When I am not doing science I love spending time with my husband, two beagles, and three young children!

I am also an affiliate faculty in the Translational Plant Science Center (https://translationalplantsci.fralinlifesci.vt.edu) and the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture (https://caia.cals.vt.edu).

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