Ristaino received her B.S. degree in biological sciences in 1978 and her M.S. degree in plant pathology in 1982 from the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1987. Since 1987, Ristaino has been on the faculty of North Carolina State University, and she currently holds the rank of William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor.
In 2012, Ristaino served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the Bureau for Food Security of the United States Agency for International Development]. In 2016, she received the Excellence in International Service Award from the American Phytopathological Society In 2019 she was awarded the Global Engagement Award from NC State University.
Ristaino serves as the director of the “Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security” cluster at NC State, has served as a Jefferson Science Fellow for the US Department of State and received a Fulbright European Research Scholar Award to work with the University of Catania on late blight in Italy in 2018. In August 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society and named a AAAS Fellow in November, 2020.
Ristaino's lab at NC State works on emerging plant diseases that threaten global food security. A major focus of research is to understand the factors that contribute to disease emergence including the epidemiology and population genetics of Oomycete plant pathogens in the genus Phytophthora. Phytophthora infestans caused the Great Famine of Ireland in the 1840s, and is a reemerging threat to global food security. She studies the population genetics and migrations of both historic and present day strains of the pathogen. Her lab was part of a multi-investigator group that sequenced the genome of the pathogen. She is now using the genome sequence to develop novel strategies for managing disease in the field. Her team has developed a web portal called USAblight.org that can be used to track recent outbreaks of disease using geospatial analytics. She also works on other pathogens of tropical crop plants including black Sigatoka on banana, downy mildew of tobacco, soilborne fungi and coffee rust that are threats to global food security.
