CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Twelve scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named to the 2025 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes researchers and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence, as reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade.
The highly cited Illinois researchers this year are: natural resources and environmental sciences professor Kaiyu Guan; materials science and engineering professor Axel Hoffmann; climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences professor Atul Jain; plant biology professor Tracy Lawson; plant biology and crop sciences professor emeritus Donald Ort; psychology professor Brent Roberts; Siebel School of Computing and Data Science professor Jimeng Sun; cell and developmental biology professor Boxuan Zhao; chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Huimin Zhao; and civil and environmental engineering professor Lei Zhao.
This year’s list also includes psychology professor emeritus Ed Diener and plant biology and crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long, both of whom are deceased.
“Highly Cited Researchers demonstrate significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research,” Clarivate Analytics reports. “Each researcher selected has authored multiple highly cited papers, which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science Core Collection over the past eleven years.” Other metrics and qualitative analyses are also used to compile the list. This year, 7,131 researchers are on the list.
Lawson studies the influence of stomatal behavior on plant productivity and water-use efficiency, manipulating stomatal anatomy and function to produce crops that are more resilient to environmental changes, including higher temperatures and drought. She also focuses on developing new phenotyping tools to optimize plant growth in controlled environments, including vertical farms. She is an affiliate of the IGB.
Ort’s research focuses on improving photosynthesis and addresses crop responses to global change including rising carbon dioxide levels, temperature stress and drought. He directed the open-air agricultural laboratory SoyFACE, led a Genomic Ecology of Global Change theme at the IGB, served as a research director of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation and was deputy director of the international research project Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency.
Long, who died in September, used computational and bioengineering approaches to improve photosynthetic efficiency in crop plants and to address the effects of climate change on crop physiology and yields. He founded RIPE, a multinational project to increase crop production. He was the founding editor of the journal Global Change Biology, and was invited to give a TED Talk about his work in 2023. He was a professor in the IGB, and an affiliate of the NCSA and the Center for Advanced Study at the U. of I.