Amy Marshall-Colon leads modeling research for the RIPE project. She is an Associate Professor in Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has been recognized for her achievements with the Joseph B, Hawkes Research Award, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Faculty Fellowship, and the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology Competition Winner among others. The Marshall-Colon Lab utilizes a systems approach to integrate genomic and metabolomic information into network models to investigate and predict how plants respond to the environment. Their work is focused on understanding what causes genes to turn on and off in response to signals from the environment. Being able to find out more of the complex switchboard inside a plant will allow researchers to act as operators and leverage their natural mechanisms to help them keep pace with the rapidly changing climate. Marshall-Colon got her bachelor’s degree from Lipscomb University, master’s from the University of Florida, and completed her Ph.D. at Purdue University. She was also an NIH-NRSA fellow.