URBANA, IL (Chambana Today) – Stephen Long, the U of I’s Ikenberry Endowed Chair Emeritus of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences, has been selected as a Top Agri-food Pioneer (TAP) for 2025 by the World Food Prize Foundation. The honor goes to trailblazers driving change in agriculture and global food security.
Long’s research has shown how engineering crops to improve photosynthesis leads to greater productivity. He was the director of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), a multinational project, from its founding in 2012 until his retirement earlier this year.
“I’ve been pursuing this work all my career, so I’m very delighted to have it recognized, although I think the mission is more important than my recognition,” Long said in a statement released through the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.
Long’s research offers real-world solutions for enhancing crop resilience in a changing climate, ensuring stable and sufficient food for a growing global population. Long says that improving photosynthesis is one way to boost the food supply to keep up with that global growth. Doing so enables humans to produce more per acre of land, and he says that the process is fairly similar across different crops.
“I’ve been studying photosynthesis in crops for 50 years, and people used to believe that you can’t improve it, or nature would have already done it. We’ve been able to show that is not the case; our crops probably only achieve about a third of the theoretical efficiency of photosynthesis. This suggests there’s quite a lot of room for improvement, and now some of that improvement is being made,” he stated.
Long, alongside the rest of the 2025 class of TAP trailblazers representing 27 countries, will be recognized at the Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, Iowa, in October.