The highly cited Illinois researchers this year are: crop sciences and plant biology professor Elizabeth Ainsworth, natural resources and environmental sciences professor Kaiyu Guan, materials science and engineering professor Axel Hoffmann, atmospheric sciences professor Atul Jain, materials science and engineering professor emerita Jennifer A. Lewis, plant biology professor Donald Ort, psychology professor Brent Roberts, and mechanical science and engineering professor Arend van der Zande. Psychology professor emeritus Ed Diener, who is deceased, is also on this year’s list. In addition to being a professor of crop sciences and of plant biology, Ainsworth is employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit. She is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of I. Her work focuses on plant metabolism, photosynthesis and molecular variation within species and how those factors contribute to plant responses to global change. A key goal is to maximize crop production in the future. Ainsworth was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences in 2019 and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. Ort is the Robert Emerson Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at Illinois. His research focuses on improving photosynthesis and addresses crop responses to global change including increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature. He leads the Genomic Ecology of Global Change research theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and was elected to the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service Science Hall of Fame in 2015 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.