When Jean Ristaino retired as a William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of plant pathology in December 2025, her cake was decorated with an image of a potato, a magnifying glass and the words “To the Sherlock of Spuds.” She’s best known for her work tracing the origins of the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine.

Graduate students have been integral to Ristaino’s work, which focuses on plant diseases threatening global food security. So when she retired after a 38-year career at NC State, she established an endowment to provide stipends to plant pathology graduate students at NC State. 

“It felt like a way of leaving a legacy,” she says. “Right now, budgets and grants are being cut. This is one way to help the department and the students.”

When Ristaino started college, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to major in history or science. She ended up researching the disease attributed to wiping out potato crops in Ireland in the mid-1800s and killing a million people. Ristaino eventually showed the disease originated in South America. She tested 150-year-old specimens of potato leaves, examined transatlantic shipping records and spent time in the Andes, where potatoes were first cultivated. She was able to sequence the genome of the disease, Phytophthora infestans, helping breeders develop disease-resistant crops. 

During all this work, she traveled extensively, including to Ireland on a Fulbright scholarship. She hopes the stipend from her endowment will help some graduate students travel, both for research and to attend conferences and symposia. “There is so much going on around the world,” she says. And for graduate students, attending a conference with others in their field “is an important career trajectory,” she says. “To present a paper with people asking questions, interacting, to meet people whose papers they’ve read — all that’s important.”

This year, Ristaino will publish a book about the origins of the famine designed for lay readers. She plans to give a signed copy of The Potato Plague to each student who receives a stipend from the endowment.  

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