Steve Long

Steve Long is the Ikenberry Endowed Chair of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. He is also a Distinguished Professor of Crop Sciences at Lancaster University in the U.K. His expertise ranges from plant molecular biology to in silico crop design and field analyses of the impacts of atmospheric change on food crops. (Watch a brief video about this work.) As co-director, he will help oversee the reduction in water loss and engineering water-efficiency sorghum research objectives. In particular, he will lead the screening of seedlings for water use efficiency (WUE) and alteration of sorghum leaf angles for higher WUE.  

Steve is also the director of ARPA-E-funded Plants Engineered to Replace Oil in Sugarcane (PETROSS) and Transportation Energy Resource from Renewable Agriculture Mobile Energy-Crop Phenotyping Platform (TERRA-MEPP). In addition, he directs Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has published papers in more than 300 peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and was recently listed as one of Thomson Reuters’ “Most Influential Scientific Minds of 2015.” He earned his bachelor’s in agriculture from Reading University and his doctorate in plant sciences from Leeds University.