Justin McGrath

Justin McGrath is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Integrative Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a research focus on understanding plant nutrient uptake mechanisms under climate change stressors. His work aims to improve crop nutritional quality through integrated modeling approaches.

• Position: Adjunct Assistant Professor
• Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Collaboration: USDA (via email affiliation)

Research Interests center on:

• Mechanisms of plant nutrient acquisition
• Climate change impacts on crop quality
• Development of holistic crop growth models
• Integration of nutrient uptake dynamics into yield-quality frameworks
• Focus on elevated CO2 and ozone effects
• Economic implications for food-insecure populations

Publication Trends reveal consistent work on climate-crop interactions, with recent 2025 studies addressing photosynthetic modeling errors and 2024 contributions on nutrient quality, lidar-based phenotyping, and chlorophyll regulation. Earlier works include crop simulation software (BioCro II, Soybean-BioCro) and climate stress analyses.

Education includes a B.S. from Bradley University and a Ph.D. from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Laboratory Focus: Climate-resilient crop modeling using the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE) facility, combining physiological data with computational models to optimize nutrient quality under environmental stressors.