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 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. 

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.

Elena Pelech is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Steve Long at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Elena's research focuses on exploring both ecological and technological methods to increase plant productivity on a land area basis. Elena earned her bachelor's degree in genetics from the University of Essex and she later went on to earn her doctorate in plant physiology from the University of Illinois. Her PhD project's work was focused on plant growth and architecture using both field experiments and three-dimensional model simulations to elucidate the ecophysiological complexities of intercropping systems to improve ecosystem services.