Three ACES scientists rank among the world's most influential

Three ACES scientists are among 12 faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who have been named to the 2025 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes researchers and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence, as 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; plant biology and crop sciences professor emeritus Donald Ort; and plant biology and crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long, who died earlier this year.

“Highly Cited Researchers demonstrate significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research,” Clarivate Analytics reports. “Each researcher selected has authored multiple highly cited papers, which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science Core Collection over the past eleven years.” Other metrics and qualitative analyses are also used to compile the list. This year, 7,131 researchers are on the list.

Kaiyu Guan

Guan works to ensure sustainable food production and develop solutions to address environmental challenges in agriculture, focusing on agroecosystem modeling, remote sensing, environmental forecasting and agricultural adaptation to climate change. He is the founding director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center; a professor of computing and data science; a professor in the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment; a Blue Waters professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

Donald Ort

Ort’s research focuses on improving photosynthesis and addresses crop responses to global change including rising carbon dioxide levels, temperature stress and drought. He directed the open-air agricultural laboratory SoyFACE, led a Genomic Ecology of Global Change theme at the IGB, served as a research director of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation and was deputy director of the international research project Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency.

Stephen Long

Long, who died in September, used computational and bioengineering approaches to improve photosynthetic efficiency in crop plants and to address the effects of climate change on crop physiology and yields. He founded RIPE, a multinational project to increase crop production. He was the founding editor of the journal Global Change Biology, and was invited to give a TED Talk about his work in 2023. He was a professor in the IGB, and an affiliate of the NCSA and the Center for Advanced Study at the U. of I.