天美传媒

Steve Long has served as Principal Investigator and Director of the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) Project since its inception in 2012.  He is the Ikenberry Endowed Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. Steve's research has increased our understanding of how global climate change is affecting plants and how photosynthetic efficiency in crops may be improved to effect sustainable yield increases. His expertise ranges from plant molecular biology and mathematical modeling to in silico crop design and field analyses of the impacts of atmospheric change and transgenic modifications of photosynthesis on crop performance. Steve is also the director of Renewable Oil Generated with Ultra-productive Energycane (ROGUE) He served as Deputy Director of the UC Berkeley-U Illinois-BP Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) until 2012. He is Founding and Chief Editor of Global Change Biology, of GCB Bioenergy and of in silico Plants. 

Steve was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013 and as a Member of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America in 2019.  He has been recognized by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate as a highly cited researcher in Plant and Animal Sciences in every year from 2005 to 2021. His work has been published in more than 400 peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Science. He has been recognized with many awards, including the Marsh Award for Climate Change Research from the British Ecological Society, the Kettering Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Innovation Award from the International Society for Photosynthesis Research and the Graduate Student Mentoring Award of the University of Illinois. He served as the Newton-Abraham Visiting Professor at Oxford University, UK, where he retains a Visiting Professorship. He has given briefings on food security and bioenergy to President George W. Bush at the White House, to the Vatican, and to Bill Gates. He earned his bachelor鈥檚 in agriculture from Reading University and his doctorate in plant sciences from Leeds University.

Realizing increased Photosynthetic (RIPE) Project Deputy Director Donald Ort is the Robert Emerson Professor in Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. His research seeks to understand and improve plant growth and photosynthetic performance in changing environmental conditions, such as increasing CO2 temperature and drought. Don's research ranges from improving photosynthetic efficiency to the molecular and biochemical basis of environmental interactions with crop plants to ecological genomics. His research spans from the molecular to crop canopies in the field. Don earned his bachelor鈥檚 degree in biology from Wake Forest University and his doctorate in plant biochemistry from Michigan State University. He has served as the president of the American Society of Plant Biologists, the International Society of Photosynthesis Research, and the International Association of Plant Physiology. He also served as editor-in-chief of Plant Physiology and is an associate editor of Annual Review of Plant Biology. Don has received numerous awards and recognitions, including election to the National Academy of Sciences and being named one of Thomson Reuters鈥� Most Influential Scientific Minds. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed papers in journals that include Science.

Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) Project Deputy Director Lisa Ainsworth is a Research Plant Physiologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) and an adjunct professor of plant biology and crop sciences at the University of Illinois. Lisa鈥檚 research applies physiological, biochemical, and genomic tools to understand the mechanisms of plant responses to global climate change. Her current research is quantifying genetic variation in response to elevated ozone concentrations among diverse inbred and hybrid maize lines in the field. She is also developing high-throughput phenotyping techniques to identify ozone sensitivity and the genes and gene networks underpinning these ozone responses in corn and soybeans. For the RIPE project, she is working on understanding the architecture of crop canopies and how this structure impacts their photosynthetic efficiency. 

Lisa earned her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and went on to earn her doctorate from Illinois. She has received the Charles Albert Shull Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists, the President鈥檚 Medal from the Society of Experimental Biology, and was named a University Scholar by Illinois. She was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019. In addition, Lisa was honored with the 2019 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences, and she was elected to the NAS in 2020. In 2021, Lisa was named the USDA-ARS' Distinguished Senior Research Scientist of the Year. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Science Advances and Plant, Cell & Environment. Her work has been published in many peer-reviewed journals, including Science, PNAS, and Plant Physiology. 

Carl Bernacchi is the Deputy Director of Phenotyping for the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) Project. He is a Research Plant Physiologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) with the Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit and an adjunct professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois. Carl runs a research group at Illinois that attempts to understand the impacts of climatic change on Midwest crop species and climate and land-use changes on biogeochemical cycles. His research studies the feedback between vegetation and climate in a changing environment using in-field experiments and modeling from leaf- to ecosystem scales. This work addresses many issues related to global change, including rising carbon dioxide, rising tropospheric ozone, increasing temperatures, drought, and land-use change. Carl earned his master’s degree at Bradley University and went on to earn his doctorate at the University of Illinois. His work is widely published in journals that include Plant Cell & Environment, Plant Science, and Plant Physiology.

Dr. Amir Ahkami is a biologist and the leader of the . Ahkami joined EMSL in 2015 to support the development of the plant science research program. He also holds the position of adjunct assistant professor at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. He is currently leading research projects as a principal investigator focusing on poplar (Populus spp.) and model grasses’ (Brachypodium鈥痑nd鈥疭etaria) responses to abiotic stresses, molecular physiology of root formation, and physiological phenotyping to narrow the genotype-to-phenotype knowledge gap for crop improvement. He employs state-of-the-art technologies, including single cell-type specific molecular profiling coupled with high-resolution cellular imaging to address plant biology research gaps on molecular and physiological mechanisms that control bioenergy crop productivity and fitness in relationship to microbial communities in the rhizosphere. He is also assisting EMSL collaborators and users in the development of creative new applications for plant sciences.鈥� 

Andrew Leakey is Professor and Head of the Plant Biology Department, in addition to Director for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) and adjunct faculty in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Leakey is now working on the RIPE Project with a focus on stomatal conductance. Leakey brings 20 years of experience researching the interface of physiology, genetics, and molecular biology. Leakey earned his Bachelor of Science in 1998 at the University of Sheffield, where he also earned his Ph.D. in 2003. He completed a postdoc in Steve Long’s lab from 2004-2007, then became a research fellow at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Leakey’s research broadly addresses the need to improve the understanding of how the environment impacts ecosystem goods and services while advancing efforts to improve and protect crop production and water cycling. His focus within RIPE is to understand the genetic and physiological controls of stomatal patterning and photosynthetic water-use efficiency (WUE) through a combination of molecular genetics, quantitative genetics, and physiology.

Coralie Salesse-Smith is a postdoctoral researcher within the lab of Stephen Long at the University of Illinois. She earned her bachelor's degree in biology—specializing in molecular biology and biotechnology—from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and completed her doctorate in plant physiology at Cornell University in New York. Coralie's work has been published in Nature Plants, Plant Physiology, and the Journal of Experimental Botany, among others. She currently works on improving the mesophyll conductance of crops important to Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia as part of the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project.

Professor Kris Nyogi is the Associate Chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Kris is also a faculty scientist in the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology at Johns Hopkins University, his master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, and he received his doctorate in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been given multiple awards including: the Howard Hughes Award, the Charles Albert Schull Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists, and the Melvin Calvin Award from the International Society of Photosynthesis Research. In 2016, Kris was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 2020, he was recognized by the Web of Science group as 2020's Highly Cited Researchers, an achievement earned by those who have published multiple papers ranking in the top 1% by citations across 21 disciplines. Kris studies how photosynthetic energy conversion works, how it is regulated, and how it might be improved. His research focuses on the biosynthesis and function of photosynthetic pigments, assembly of photosynthetic reaction centers, structure and dynamics of the photosynthetic membrane, mechanisms involved in sensing excess light, and regulation of photosynthetic light harvesting in saturating light.

Dhruv Patel-Tupper is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and technology Policy (STPF) Fellow and science advisor for the USDA. He works to mainstream solutions to institutionalize climate action across science and trade. He works to ensure that agricultural innovations and international policies at the intersection of agriculture and climate change are evidence-based, scientifically rigorous, scalable, and sustainable. Pattel-Tupper is a former Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) Fellow and postdoctoral researcher in the Niyogi Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his doctorate in plant biology from Berkeley and his bachelor's degree in plant and biological sciences from Cornell University.

Current research in Virginia and West Virginia includes natural history and conservation studies of two endangered plant species, the shale barren rock cress (Bochera serotina) and piratebush (Buckleya distichiophylla). Additionally, I am conducting studies on a plant species known from only one population in Virginia, Michaux’s gladecress (Leavenworthia uniflora). A major part of each of these studies involves pollination experiments and flower-visitor observations. Floristic surveys in Rockingham County and other parts of the Shenandoah Valley also comprise some of my Virginia studies.
My Galápagos research has taken a variety of directions. Over the years, my work has concentrated on the reproductive biology of Galápagos natives and endemics. However, I am currently involved in a systematics study of a few members of the Galápagos endemic flowering plant genus Scalesia. My colleagues and I, using morphological and molecular data are attempting to determine the boundaries of these species, and whether they are capable of forming fertile hybrids.
Dr. McMullen is author of the book, Flowering Plants of the Galápagos, published by Cornell University Press. 

Dr. McMullen earned his doctorate at the University of Maryland, his master's at JMU and his bachelor's at Eastern Mennonite University.