The consequences of climate change present significant challenges revolving around plant resilience, food systems, and training the next generation of problem solvers. My dissertation approaches these challenges with a lens of plant health, human health, and the educational training to help create a more sustainable future. In Chapter 1 of my dissertation, I examine how the avocado (Persea americana), a subtropical fruit with increasing production demands, uses water and responds to climate variability. I examined various plant functional traits of five commercially relevant avocado cultivars, spanning from least intentionally bred to most intentionally bred: Lyon, Hass, Fuerte, GEM, and BL516. I found that cultivars differ in their leaf- and stem- water management strategies and climate responses, with insight that newer cultivars may be better suited to a rapidly changing climate, particularly for trees grown in rainfed conditions. Building on these findings, in Chapter 2, I explored the socio-ecological impacts of avocado production in Michoacán, Mexico, the largest avocado-producing region in the world. Specifically, I investigated how avocado expansion affects ecosystems and the occupational health of production workers. From this analysis, I developed a potential knowledge-action model aimed at promoting long-term health of humans and ecosystems in the face of continued agricultural demand. Beyond the agricultural system, in Chapter 3, I investigated how a local invasive grass, Bromus diandrus, interacts with microbial communities, focusing on growth and early ontogeny. We established a soil microbial inoculum gradient, and found that plant response to higher density microbial conditions influenced growth, but was constrained by an allometric relationship between roots and shoots; lower density inoculum resulted in plants with greater shoot-than-root growth, restricting total biomass production through seedling establishment. Finally, in Chapter 4, I worked alongside Ridge 2 Reef colleagues to develop strategies for improving training and modernizing STEM graduate education programs to better equip the workforce for addressing grand challenges, including those related to climate change and the future of agricultural systems. We developed five design principles to best prepare future problem solvers to tackle complex, interdisciplinary challenges, collaboratively. Together, the projects of my dissertation integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines to address ongoing and emerging challenges of sustainability of food systems in the face of global change.