World Food Prize to honor Long

URBANA, Ill. — Stephen Long, Ikenberry Endowed Chair Emeritus of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been selected as 2025 Top Agri-food Pioneer by the World Food Prize Foundation.

The honor recognizes trailblazers who are driving change in agriculture and global food security.

Long’s groundbreaking research has demonstrated how engineering crops to improve photosynthesis leads to greater productivity.

He was director of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, a multinational project, from its founding in 2012 until his retirement earlier this year.

“I’ve been pursuing this work all my career, so I’m very delighted to have it recognized, although I think the mission is more important than my recognition,” Long said.

His visionary science offers real-world solutions for enhancing crop resilience in a changing climate and ensuring a stable, sufficient food supply for a growing global population.

“The world is running out of food relative to the number of people, and every year more people are starving, according to the United Nations’ definition,” he said.

“Improving photosynthesis is one way to boost the food supply, and it has two main advantages. First, it will enable us to produce more per acre of land. Second, the process is fairly similar across crops. So, if you can find a way of improving it in one, you can probably do it in all of them.”

Long said one of his most important achievements is contributing to the education of young researchers who are now carrying on this important work in industry or faculty positions around the world.

“I’ve been studying photosynthesis in crops for 50 years, and people used to believe that you can’t improve it, or nature would have already done it. We’ve been able to show that is not the case; our crops probably only achieve about a third of the theoretical efficiency of photosynthesis. This suggests there’s quite a lot of room for improvement, and now some of that improvement is being made,” he said.

Long was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013 and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and a Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2023.

He is also a Corresponding Member of the Australian Society of Plant Scientists, a member of the Royal Society’s Earth Sciences Committee and adviser to the U.S. National Academies.

Long is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, and the Center for Advanced Study at the U of I.

The 2025 Top Agri-food Pioneer trailblazers, representing 27 countries, will be recognized in October at the Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, Iowa.