Carlos L. Ballaré is professor of plant biology at the University of Buenos Aires and San Martín National University (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and a senior scientist with the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). He completed his MSc and PhD degrees at the University of Buenos Aires and at Oregon State University (USA), respectively, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Utah State University (USA). His laboratory has conducted pioneering research on the role of photoreceptors in regulating plant responses to the proximity of neighbors, and on the effects of ultraviolet radiation on plants and terrestrial ecosystems. The Ballaré lab uses a combination of genetic, physiological, and genomic and biochemical tools to understand the mechanisms by which photoreceptors regulate plant immunity against pathogens and herbivores. Carlos has received several awards including the recognition as one of the 50 Latin American leaders for the New Millennium by CNN and Time (1990), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001), the Konex Merit Prize in 2013, awarded by the Konex Foundation (Argentina), and the Georg Forster Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) in 2017 and was elected to the National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Argentina in 2021. Carlos has served on the editorial boards of several leading journals in the fields of plant biology and ecology, including Plant Physiology (2000-2005), New Phytologist (2017--) and Oecologia (2015--), where he is currently one of the Editors-in-Chief. As part of his outreach activity, Carlos has been a member of the Environmental Effects Assessment Panel of the United Nations Environment Programme, between 2002 and 2019