Two ACES scientists rank among world's most influential
Two researchers in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named to the 2024 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes research scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence – reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade.
The highly cited ACES researchers this year are natural resources and environmental sciences professor Kaiyu Guan, and crop sciences and plant biology professor Stephen Long. Four others from campus are also on this year’s list.
Guan works to ensure sustainable food production and develop solutions to environmental challenges in agriculture, focusing on agroecosystem modeling, remote sensing, environmental forecasting and agricultural adaptation to climate change. He uses satellite data, computational models, fieldwork, supercomputing and machine-learning approaches to address how climate and human practices affect crop productivity, water resource availability and ecosystem functioning. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and is the chief scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium. At the U. of I., Guan is the founding director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center, a professor of computing and data science and a Blue Waters professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Long is the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology. He uses computational and bioengineering approaches to improve photosynthetic efficiency in crop plants and works to address the effects of climate change on crop physiology and yields. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. He founded Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, a multinational project to increase crop production. He also is the founding and chief editor of the journal Global Change Biology, a highly cited journal on how global change is altering the biosphere. He is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Insitute for Genomic Biology, NCSA and the Center for Advanced Study at the U. of I.