The Ikenberry Chair was established as an honor of the University of Illinois’ 14th president, Stanley O. Ikenberry. Jeffery S. Moore, professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering and director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology, is the only other Ikenberry Chair on campus, as the Ikenberry Endowed Chair of Chemistry.

Long joined the University of Illinois in 1999. He has established an internationally acclaimed laboratory dedicated to using computational and experimental approaches to understand all 170 steps of photosynthesis. Long has worked tirelessly to build connections worldwide and across generations of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty to transform our knowledge of photosynthesis into higher-yielding crops and address the effects of climate change on crop productivity.

Long is member at Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, a faculty fellow for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois, and a professor at the Center for Advanced Studies.