National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences
NAS Prize Recipients
Dr. Ross-Ibarra
University of California, Davis
Dr. Ross-Ibarra, professor at University of California, Davis, is the 2024 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture.
Ross-Ibarra’s research uses population genetic approaches to address questions ranging from transposable element evolution to the genetics of quantitative traits, maize and human coevolution, domestication and local adaptation. His studies of maize and its wild relatives have revealed the extensive impact of changing genomic diversity in maize and demonstrated the utility of genomic approaches to predict crop performance.
Dr. Huaijun Zhou
University of California, Davis
Dr. Huaijun Zhou, Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow at University of California, Davis, is the 2023 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences.
Zhou’s multidisciplinary approach to animal and poultry genome research supports improved global food security through genetic enhancement of poultry health and production efficiencies.
Zhou’s team developed an economical genetic selection platform that will help breeders improve resilience to Newcastle disease infection, reduce virus shedding and improve production traits in poultry indigenous to the African continent. Zhou’s research also identified microorganisms that limit Salmonella growth in poultry gut, allowing the poultry industry to develop probiotics to reduce instances of Salmonella.
Zhou is building institutional and human capacity in low-income countries. In addition to breakthroughs impacting animal health and production and empowering women, Zhou is training scientists at Tanzania’s Sokoine University of Agriculture and the University of Ghana.
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Dr. David Lobell
Stanford University
Dr. David Lobell, Professor of Earth System Science at Stanford University, is the 2022 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences.
Lobell’s groundbreaking work has advanced the world’s understanding of the effects of climate variability and change on global crop productivity.
Lobell’s innovative use of remote sensing, statistics, ecosystem modeling, and agronomy addresses challenges at the interface between agriculture and the environment. His work has revealed crop responses to global climate change to inform strategies to minimize the environmental impact of agriculture. He has also identified novel adaptations and investments for improving world food security.
He continues to chart the path forward toward the next generation of interpreting satellite imagery to predict key sustainable development outcomes and improve our understanding of agriculture’s interface with the environment.
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Dr. Christina M. Grozinger
Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Christina M. Grozinger, Distinguished Professor of Entomology and Director of the Center for Pollinator Research at Pennsylvania State University, is the 2021 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences.
Grozinger’s research seeks to understand the primary factors driving declines in wild and managed bee populations. She is working to develop approaches that can be used to support bees in urban, agricultural and natural landscapes. The Grozinger Lab uses an integrative approach encompassing genomics, physiology, behavior, chemical ecology and ecology.
Among many accomplishments, Grozinger’s Beescape project developed the Beescape decision support tool. This tool allows users to select sites across the continental U.S. and obtain information to evaluate whether the surrounding foraging resources, nesting resources and applied insecticide toxic load makes that site hospitable to bees. This information can help beekeepers, growers and conservationists in making decisions about how to manage their sites to better support bee populations. Grozinger and her team are also integrating data on wild and managed bee health to generate models that use local information on habitat and weather conditions to predict how bees will fare at specific locations. Additionally, Grozinger has led several studies of the distributions of viruses and parasites in bee populations across the world. These studies helped identify emerging pathogens and conditions that might influence pathogen spread.
Grozinger’s research has demonstrated that access to high quality nutritional resources can improve bees’ resilience to diseases and pesticides. Her lab is currently working to better define bees’ nutritional needs so this information can be used to improve pollinator habitat restoration practices. She and her collaborators are screening diverse flowering plant species to identify those that will best support bee nutritional needs in natural, agricultural and urban landscapes.
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Dr. Zachary B. Lippman
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Dr. Zachary B. Lippman, a Jacob Goldfield Professor of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, is the 2020 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences.
A growing population, climate change and environmental sustainability inhibit crop productivity and threaten food security. Lippman’s research focuses on increasing crop productivity in the face of declining agricultural land and population growth. His research demonstrates that yields can be increased, new crops created and adapted to new environments, by harnessing genes that determine when, where and how many flowers are produced on a plant.
Specifically, Lippman studies how groups of stem cells become flowers, which ultimately give rise to fruits and seeds, making flowers vitally important to food production. He discovered timing mechanisms that control how many flowers a plant produces. This discovery allows him to control how much fruit and how many seeds a plant generated.
When combined with hormones that control flowering and gene editing, Lippman and his team embarked on a new frontier of quantitively fine-tuning traits in ways that were previously impossible, revealing principles that can improve productivity in all crops. Moreover, this newfound control of plant gene function and activity allows Lippman and his team to accelerate the time-consuming domestication process of a wild plant, the groundcherry, opening the door to the taming of many new and underutilized crops to help meet global food demands.
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Dr. Elizabeth Ainsworth
USDA Agricultural Research Services
Dr. Elizabeth Ainsworth, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service researcher and adjunct professor at the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois, is the 2019 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences.
Unprecedented atmospheric changes, such as climate change, can devastate crop productivity. Ainsworth’s pioneering research focuses on how the world will eat in the face of climate change and other threats. Her research reveals how man-made atmospheric changes affect the physiology and growth of crops around the world. Ainsworth is the lead investigator for the SoyFACE Global Change Research Facility, which is studying how crops respond to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and ozone, in combination with drought and other environmental stresses. The research is also identifying possible solutions. The work recently revealed that a large portion of corn and soybean harvested in the U.S. was lost due to ozone pollution over the past 20 years.
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Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou
North Carolina State University
Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou, an Associate Professor of Food Science and the Todd R. Klaenhammer Distinguished Scholar in Probiotics Research at North Carolina State University, is the 2018 recipient of the NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences.
Bacteria and viruses in dairy products account for the loss of millions of gallons of milk globally. Barrangou’s pioneering research established CRISPR as the adaptive immune system of bacteria, a discovery which promoted the practical use of CRISPR-Cas systems for genome editing. His work has tremendous worldwide applications in food and agriculture, including virus resistance in the widely used yogurt starter culture, Streptococcus thermophilus and the potential for translational genome editing in other microbes, crops and livestock.
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Dr. Edward Buckler
USDA Agriculture Research Service
Dr. Edward Buckler is the inaugural NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences recipient. Buckler, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service researcher and adjunct professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University, studies the connection between a crop plant’s genetic makeup and the physical traits exhibited by different strains.
Read more about Dr. Buckler’s research