Lia Plakans is a professor of Foreign Language and ESL Education at the University of Iowa and the Departmental Executive Officer for the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education. Previously, she held an appointment as an assistant professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on second language learning with particular emphasis on language assessment and literacy. The goal of her work is to improve educational opportunities for English Language Learners in the U.S. and internationally.

She has directed research grants funded by Educational Testing Service (ETS), Cambridge Michigan Language Assessments, and Language Learning journal. She has led three consecutive training/research grants from the U.S. Department of Education which focus on researching and applying effective approaches in preparing teachers to support English Learners in their classroom. These three grants have supported in-service and preservice teachers in Iowa through professional development and tuition stipends, totaling over $5.8M. She was an invited member of the State of Iowa ELL Task Force in 2013 that reviewed research to make recommendation to the State Legislature. She currently chairs a committee of external researchers that evaluates the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) at Educational Testing Service and organizes externally funded grant competitions. Given her work on language assessment, she was invited by the National Academies of Science and Engineering to be a member of an eight-person committee to co-author a report commissioned by the U.S. State Department (Foreign Service Institute) to be released in 2020.

She has co-authored two books Assessment Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching and Reading and Writing for Academic Success (University of Michigan Press). Her research has been published in academic journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, and Journal of Second Language Writing. She is an associate editor for Language Assessment Quarterly and served as an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. She was an International Language Testing Association member-at-large from 2010-2011 and the president of the Midwest Association of Language Testers from 2005-2010. She has supervised 16 doctoral students who have graduated in English as a second language Education. She has taught English as an additional language for over 15 years to learners across the lifespan, from 18 months to 80 years old, in Iowa, Texas, Ohio, and Latvia.