Agriculture is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Pigs, sheep, and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture.
Global climate change and agriculture are interrelated processes. Climate change can affect agriculture both directly and indirectly. Adverse outcome can come through changes in average temperatures, rainfall, and climate extremes ; changes in pests and diseases; changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground-level ozone concentrations; changes in the nutritional quality of some foods; and changes in sea level.
Eva Silverstein is an American theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and string theorist. She is best known for her work on early universe cosmology, developing the structure of inflation and its range of signatures, as well as extensive contributions to string theory and gravitational physics. Her early work included control of tachyon condensation in string theory and resulting resolution of some spacetime singularities. Other significant research contributions include the construction of the first models of dark energy in string theory, some basic extensions of the AdS/CFT correspondence to more realistic field theories, as well as the discovery of a predictive new mechanism for cosmic inflation involving D-brane dynamics which helped motivate more systematic analyses of primordial non-Gaussianity.
Pedro Sanchez is the Director of the Agriculture & Food Security Center, Senior Research Scholar, and Director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Sanchez was Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya from 1991-2001, and served as Co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force. He is also Professor Emeritus of Soil Science and Forestry at North Carolina State University, and was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Raymond Jeanloz is a professor of earth and planetary science and of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Educated at the California Institute of Technology, Amherst College and at Deep Springs College, he has contributed research fundamental to understanding of the composition of the Earth and the behavior of materials under high temperatures and pressures. He is working with colleagues to investigate the conditions inside supergiant exoplanets. Jeanloz is also a prominent figure in nuclear weapons policy, chairing the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academy of Sciences. He was an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution from 2012 to 2013. He is a co-editor of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Ruth S. DeFries is an environmental geographer who specializes in the use of remote sensing to study Earth's habitability under the influence of human activities, such as deforestation, that influence regulating biophysical and biogeochemical processes. She was one of 24 recipients of the 2007 MacArthur Fellowship, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2006.
Nadarajan "Raj" Chetty is an Indian-born American economist and the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University. Some of Chetty's recent papers have studied equality of opportunity in the United States and the long-term impact of teachers on students' performance. Offered tenure at the age of 28, Chetty became one of the youngest tenured faculty in the history of Harvard's economics department. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Currently, he is also an advisory editor of the Journal of Public Economics. In 2020, he was awarded the Infosys Prize in Economics, the highest monetary award recognizing achievements in science and research, in India.
David Leigh Donoho is an American statistician. He is a professor of statistics at Stanford University, where he is also the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. His work includes the development of effective methods for the construction of low-dimensional representations for high-dimensional data problems, development of wavelets for denoising and compressed sensing. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Jillian Fiona Banfield is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the Earth Science, Ecosystem Science and Materials Science and Engineering departments. She leads the Microbial Research initiative within the Innovative Genomics Institute, is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has a position at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Some of her most noted work includes publications on the structure and functioning of microbial communities and the nature, properties and reactivity of nanomaterials.
Benjamin K. Sovacool is an American academic who is director of the Danish Center for Energy Technology at the Department of Business Development and Technology and a professor of social sciences at Aarhus University. He is also professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex, where he directs the Center on Innovation and Energy Demand and the Sussex Energy Group. He has written on energy policy, environmental issues, and science and technology policy. Sovacool is editor-in-chief of Energy Research & Social Science.
Daniel Sigman is an American geoscientist, and the Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University. Sigman received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2009.
Claire Kremen is an American conservation biologist. She is a professor of conservation biology at the University of British Columbia, having formerly worked at the University of California, Berkeley, where she remains professor emerita.
Rajeev Kumar Varshney is an agricultural scientist, specializing in genomics, genetics, molecular breeding and capacity building in developing countries. Varsheny is currently the Research Program Director- Genetic Gains that includes several units viz. Genomics & Trait Discovery, Forward Breeding, Pre-Breeding, Cell, Molecular Biology & Genetic Engineering, Seed Systems, Biotechnology- ESA, Sequencing and Informatics Services Unit, and Genebank ; and Director, Center of Excellence in Genomics & Systems Biology at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a global agricultural research institute. He holds Adjunct/Honorary/Visiting Professor positions at 10 academic institutions in Australia, China, Ghana, Hong Kong and India, including Murdoch University, The University of Western Australia, University of Queensland, West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement, University of Hyderabad, Chaudhary Charan Singh University and Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University.
Stephen Patrick Long is a British-born American environmental plant physiologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences studying how to improve photosynthesis to increase the yield of food and biofuel crops. He is the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and Distinguished Professor in Crop Sciences at Lancaster University. His work, published in Science, proved that photosynthesis can be manipulated to increase plant productivity—an idea once considered the holy grail of plant biology. Long has added to our understanding of the long-term impacts of climate change, such as rising levels of carbon dioxide and ozone on plants. He has briefed former President George W. Bush and the Vatican, as well as Bill Gates and Anne, Princess Royal, on food security and bioenergy.
Pete Smith is Professor of Soils and Global change at the University of Aberdeen where he directs the Scottish Climate Change Centre of Expertise, ClimateXChange.
Rosamond (Roz) Lee Naylor is an American economist focused on global food security and sustainable agriculture. She is the William Wrigley Professor of the Stanford University School of Earth System Science, and the founding Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford, University. Her academic career has centered on environmental science and policy related to global food systems and food security. She is the President of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Global Change Institute, a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, and a member of the Forest Protection Advisory Panel for Cargill.
Zachary B. Lippman is an American plant biologist and the Jacob Goldfield Professor of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Lippman has used gene editing technology to investigate the control of fruit production in various crops. In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 he received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences.
Geoffrey Alan Lawrence is an Australian sociologist, academic and researcher. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Queensland.
Joachim von Braun is a German agricultural scientist and currently director of a department of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn and president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
