UF plant biologist Anna-Lisa Paul receives SURA’s Distinguished Scientist Award
UF plant biologist Anna-Lisa Paul receives SURA’s Distinguished Scientist Award
by Joe Kays
University of Florida plant molecular biologist Anna-Lisa Paul has been named a recipient of the Southeastern Universities Research Association’s (SURA) 2025 Distinguished Scientist Award, recognizing her groundbreaking contributions to space biology and her leadership in advancing scientific exploration beyond Earth.
Paul is the director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR), and a research professor in UF’s Department of Horticultural Sciences where she co-leads the UF Space Plants Lab with colleague Rob Ferl. Together, they and their team investigate how plants respond to the unique stresses of orbital spaceflight and other novel exploration environments. Their research includes using the International Space Station to study transcriptomic and epigenetic responses to living in space, using suborbital launch vehicles to study molecular processes during the transition to space, and growing plants in lunar regolith to explore the feasibility of sustained outposts on the Moon.
Paul served as the principal investigator on a NASA-funded experiment that resulted in the first evidence of epigenetic change in plants in response to growth in the spaceflight environment. These groundbreaking results opened the door for a second NASA grant to Paul and Ferl to conduct a multigenerational plant experiment on the ISS to study epigenetic change.
Paul was the co-principal investigator on NASA’s first grant awarded for human-tended research in suborbital vehicles. The grant was awarded to Ferl and Paul in 2018 and came to fruition in 2024 when Ferl became the first university researcher to conduct their own experiment in space and qualify as an astronaut. Paul managed the ground-based control experiments from Blue Origin’s launch site in Texas.
In 2022, Paul and Ferl were the first to successfully…