Carolyn Lawrence-Dill

While their findings were under peer review, the Des Moines Register released a front-page article describing their findings (February 25, 2018). The researchers released a preprint of the article via the SocArXiv within a day to ensure that detailed materials, methods, and interpretations of the data were fully available. A media frenzy followed with coverage in more than 80 newspapers, online websites, and radio broadcasts, with audio coverage through National Public Radio’s Marketplace (February 28, 2018) and Iowa Public Radio’s River to River (March 2, 2018). There was even a political cartoon released by Greg Kearney, and Bill Gates defended GMOs via a Reddit Ask Me Anything discussion in the midst of the coverage. The peer-reviewed publication was accepted March 11, 2018. Subsequent to media coverage of the GMO-Russia connections, reports of other seemingly unrelated hot topics showed signs of Russian influence with apparent intention to cause discord, with demonstrations of influence campaigns emerging on wide-ranging topics from energy to human rights to international trade.

In 2016, Lawrence-Dill and sociologist Shawn Dorius began work to better understand where negative public opinions on GMOs and climate change originate. While investigating how GMOs were portrayed in US news coverage, information on Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections emerged, with English language Russian state news from RT and Sputnik being ordered to register as foreign agents. This led the team to look into news reported by RT and Sputnik, where they found their portrayal of GMO topics to be very different from that in US media. Russian state news about GMOs was almost entirely negative, with seemingly intentional mis-associations linking GMOs with controversial, unrelated, and distasteful topics (e.g., topics on abortions of Zika-infected fetuses and the Trans-Pacific Partnership). The team hypothesized that this sort of activity could aim not only to stir up controversy in the US, but that to serve economic interests in Russia given that Russia’s number two industry is agriculture.

In the summer of 2005, Lawrence-Dill began work as a research geneticist for the USDA-ARS. She served as the director of MaizeGDB, the maize model organism database through December 2013. In 2014 she joined the faculty of Iowa State University as an associate professor in the Departments of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology and Agronomy. In 2019 she was promoted to the rank of professor. In 2021, she was named Associate Dean for Research and Discovery for the Iowa State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Associate Director of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station.

Carolyn Joy Lawrence-Dill, née Cogburn, was born in El Paso, Texas. She grew up in Throckmorton, then moved to Cleburne in 1989. She graduated in 1992 from Cleburne High School. Lawrence-Dill earned a B.A. degree in biology from Hendrix College in 1996. She received her M.S. degree in biology in 1997 from Texas Tech University where she worked on cotton physiology, and her Ph.D. degree in botany in 2003 from the University of Georgia. Her doctoral dissertation focused on integrating traditional and computational methods for inferring gene function in plants.

Carolyn Joy Lawrence-Dill (born May 18, 1974) is an American plant biologist and academic administrator. She develops computational systems and tools to help plant science researchers use plant genetics and genomics data for basic biology applications that advance plant breeding.