CIMMYT applies high quality science to develop more resilient agrifood systems. This year three scientists from CIMMYT are included in Clarivate’s 2023 Analysis of the most highly cited academic papers.
Jill Cairns participates at a plenary session. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
While CIMMYT’s mission does explicitly require academic publication from its scientists, “the recognition reflects extensive networking with academia, opening doors for new technologies to benefit resource-poor farmers and consumers as well as lending scientific kudos to CIMMYT and underpinning fundraising efforts,” says Distinguished Scientist and Head of Wheat Physiology, Matthew Reynolds.
Maize Physiologist Jill Cairns and collaborators spearheaded the application of high throughput phenotyping for maize-breeding in sub-Saharan Africa, which she says, “would not have been possible without involving leading academic experts like JL Araus at Barcelona University.”
José Crossa chairs the session: adding value to phenotypic data. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
Biometrician and Distinguished Scientist José Crossa has pioneered wheat genetic analysis and use of artificial intelligence to solve crop research questions. “With machine learning tools like Deep Learning, there is a golden opportunity to understand the many complex dimensions of crop adaptation, so data-driven breeding models will have the necessary precision to target complex traits,” he explains. Crossa is widely respected by leading academics in biometrics for his insights on bridging statistical theory to solve real world problems.
Reynolds has built initiatives like the Heat and Drought Wheat Improvement Consortium (HeDWIC) and the International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP) that transfer cutting-edge technologies—from many of the best academic institutions in the world—to application in breeding, helping to widen wheat gene pools globally.
Matthew Reynolds speaks at a workshop. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
All three scientists achieved the same recognition last year. As in 2022, Reynolds was awarded for his contribution to scientific literature in plant and animal sciences, while Cairns and Crossa were awarded for their contributions to scientific literature across several fields of research (cross fields).
Since 2001, Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list has identified global research scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research. It recognizes exceptional research performance demonstrated by the production of multiple papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year, according to the Web of Science citation indexing service.
In 2023, the list recognizes 6,849 individuals from more than 1,300 institutions across 67 countries and regions.
The jury of international scientist experts evaluated twenty-three research projects spanning nine countries on four continents for the 2023 Composite Flour Innovation Award. Sidhar Bhavani, senior scientist, head of Rust Pathology and Molecular Genetics at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) enriched the jury of the Awards, aimed to highlight the scientific work around the production and processing of non-wheat flours and their blends with wheat flour.
Jill Cairns in front of CIMMYT headquarters. (Photo: Sam Storr/CIMMYT)
Three scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are included in Clarivate’s 2022 Analysis of the most highly cited academic papers.
Maize Physiologist Jill Cairns, Distinguished Scientist and Head of Wheat Physiology Matthew Reynolds, and Biometrician José Crossa, all from CIMMYT, were recognized in the 2022 analysis.
Jose Crossa chairing a session on adding value to phenotypic data. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
This year, 7,255 Highly Cited Researcher (HCR) designations were issued to 6,938 individuals globally. The award is given to scientists with papers that rank in the top 1% by citations. Matthew was awarded for his contribution to scientific literature in plant and animal sciences, while José and Jill were awarded for their contributions to scientific literature across several fields of research (cross fields).
Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers are 1 in 1,000.
The analysis highlights disparities in the locations of top cited scientists. For example, 82.9% of recipients are from just ten countries and regions, out of a possible 70, and 71.4% are from the United States of America, China, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Australia. While the recognition is only given to individual scientists, Matthew, José, and Jill’s success is related to strong scientific collaborations worldwide.
Matthew Reynolds at IWC9 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo: Julie Mollins)
A recent portrait of Rosalind Morris. (Photo: Courtesy)
Rosalind Morris, a celebrated wheat cytogeneticist and professor, peacefully passed away on March 26, 2022, just a few weeks shy of her 102nd birthday. Morris fought a long battle with cancer in her 90s and, most recently, an infection of COVID-19, which proved fatal to her health.
According to her wishes, there was no funeral or memorial service. Morris’s body was cremated, and her ashes deposited in her family’s plot in Ontario, Canada.
Born in Ruthin, United Kingdom, in 1920 to schoolteacher parents, Morris pursued studies in agricultural sciences at the University of Guelph and earned a bachelor’s degree in horticulture. Morris would later earn a Ph.D. from Cornell University’s department of plant breeding, becoming one of the first two women to accomplish this feat, along with Leona Schnell.
Morris dedicated her life and career to understanding and developing wheat genes.
A pioneer in agricultural science and one of the first women scientists of her time, Morris dedicated her life and career to understanding and developing wheat genes. Her contributions include the development of wheat genetic stocks, or wheat populations generated for genetic studies, with far-reaching impact globally in explaining wheat genetics. The work of Morris provided a premier resource base for the emerging field of functional genomics, which explores how DNA is translated into complex information in a cell.
During World War II, Morris’s deep concern over the effects of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led her to study and experiment with the effects of X-rays and thermal neutrons on crop plants. In 1979, Morris became the first woman honored as a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy.
While being an acclaimed scientist internationally, Morris was also known for her passion for teaching. In the same year Morris earned her doctoral degree from Cornell University, she was hired as the first female faculty member in the agronomy department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 1947. This career would last 43 years: first as an assistant professor in 1947, becoming a professor in 1958 and remaining in that role until 1990, when she gained the title of emeritus professor of plant cytogenetics.
Morris was a trailblazer for women in agronomy during a point in history when few women were given the opportunity to pursue a career in the sciences. Morris is remembered by her peers not only for her lifelong contribution to agricultural sciences but also her immense kindness and patience.
Velu Govindan will always remember his father telling him not to waste his food. “He used to say that rice and wheat are very expensive commodities, which most people could only afford to eat once a week during his youth,” recalls the wheat breeder, who works at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
As in many parts of the world, the Green Revolution had a radical impact on agricultural production and diets in southern India, where Govindan’s father grew up, and by the late 1960s all farmers in the area had heard of “the scientist” from the USA. “Borlaug’s influence in India is so great because those new high-yielding varieties fed millions of people — including me.”
But feeding millions was only half the battle.
Today, at least two billion people around the world currently suffer from micronutrient deficiency, characterized by iron-deficiency anemia, lack of vitamin A and zinc deficiency.
Govindan works in collaboration with HarvestPlus to improve nutritional quality in cereals in addition to core traits like yield potential, disease resistance and climate tolerance. His area of focus is South Asia, where wheat is an important staple and many smallholder farmers don’t have access to a diversified diet including fruit, vegetables or animal products which are high in micronutrients like iron and zinc.
“It’s important that people not only have access to food, but also have a healthy diet,” says Govindan. “The idea is to improve major staples like rice, maize and wheat so that people who consume these biofortified varieties get extra benefits, satisfying their daily dietary needs as well as combatting hidden hunger.”
The challenge, he explains, is that breeding for nutritional quality is often done at the expense of yield. But varieties need high yield potential to be successful on the market because farmers in developing countries will not get a premium price simply for having a high micronutrient content in their grain.
Fast evolving wheat diseases are another issue to contend with. “If you release a disease-resistant variety today, in as little as three or four years’ time it will already be susceptible because rust strains keep mutating. It’s a continuous battle, but that’s plant breeding.”
Velu Govindan speaks at International Wheat Conference in 2015. (Photo: Julie Mollins/CIMMYT)
Mainstreaming zinc
When it comes to improvement, breeding is only the first part of the process, Govindan explains. “We can do a good job here in the lab, but if our varieties are not being taken up by farmers it’s no use.”
Govindan and his team work in collaboration with a number of public and private sector organizations to promote new varieties, partnering with national agricultural research systems and advanced research institutes to reach farmers in India, Nepal and Pakistan. As a result, additional high-zinc varieties have been successfully marketed and distributed across South Asia, as well as new biofortified lines which are currently being tested in sub-Saharan Africa for potential release and cultivation by farmers.
Their efforts paid off with the development and release of more than half dozen competitive high-zinc varieties including Zinc-Shakthi, whose grain holds 40% more zinc than conventional varieties and yields well, has good resistance to rust diseases, and matures a week earlier than other popular varieties, allowing farmers to increase their cropping intensity. To date, these biofortified high-zinc wheat varieties have reached nearly a million households in target regions of South Asia and are expected to spread more widely in coming years.
The next step will be to support the mainstreaming of zinc, so that it becomes an integral part of breeding programs as opposed to an optional addition. “Hopefully in ten years’ time, most of the wheat we eat will have those extra benefits.”
There may be a long way to go, but Govindan remains optimistic about the task ahead.
Velu Govindan examines wheat in the field.
Born into a farming family, he has fond memories of a childhood spent helping his father in the fields, with afternoons and school holidays dedicated to growing rice, cotton and a number of other crops on the family plot.
The region has undergone significant changes since then, and farmers now contend with both rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall. It was a motivation to help poor farmers adapt to climate change and improve food production that led Govindan into plant breeding.
He has spent nearly ten years working on CIMMYT’s Spring Wheat Program and still feels honored to be part of a program with such a significant legacy. “Norman Borlaug, Sanjay Rajaram and my supervisor Ravi Singh — these people are legendary,” he explains. “So luckily we’re not starting from scratch. These people made life easy, and we just need to keep moving towards achieving continuous genetic gains for improved food and nutrition security.”
DNA is often referred to as the blueprint for life. It contains codes to make the proteins, molecules and cells essential for an organism’s growth and development. Over the last decade, scientists have been figuring out how specific sections of DNA in maize and wheat are associated with physical and genetic traits, such as grain size and drought resistance.
Quantitative geneticist Huihui Li with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) helps link this new genetic knowledge with traditional crop breeding, to speed up the development of improved maize and wheat varieties. Li’s research uses cutting-edge genomics, computational biology and statistical tools to turn data into useful information for plant breeders.
“Breeders always accumulate big amounts of data, most of the time they need efficient tools to mine the stories from this data. That’s part of our job in the Biometrics and Statistics Unit,” she explained.
Her research helps breeders more quickly and accurately predict which maize and wheat varieties in the CIMMYT gene bank have the traits they seek to create improved varieties. For example, if a plant breeder wanted to develop a hybrid maize variety with high protein levels and pest resistance, Li could help by identifying which parental varieties would have these traits.
It takes about ten years for crop breeders to develop a new hybrid. Removing some of the guesswork during the early stages of their experiments could reduce this time significantly. With increasing environmental pressures from climate change and population growth, releasing better crop varieties more quickly will be vital to ensure there is enough food in the future.
Li says her family and experience growing up in China greatly influenced her career choice.
“Through my grandfather’s experience as the head of the Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry, I learned that there were many people in China suffering from hunger, poverty and malnutrition,” she said.
Li realized that these issues were prevalent throughout the developing world when her mother left China for two years to serve as a foreign aid doctor in Cameroon.
“As a ten-year-old girl, I told myself that I should make my contribution to reduce hunger and poverty, and improve human nutrition in the future,” Li recalled. “I always ask myself, ‘What’s my value to humanity?”
She studied bio-mathematics and quantitative genetics at Beijing Normal University and Cornell University before joining CIMMYT in 2010 as a consultant.
“I wanted to join CIMMYT because it works throughout the developing world to improve livelihoods and foster more productive, sustainable maize and wheat farming,” Li explained. “Also, CIMMYT provided a platform where I could collaborate with scientists worldwide and receive academic and career-boosting trainings.”
She became staff in 2012 and is currently based out of the CIMMYT office in Beijing. In addition, Li is an adjunct associate professor with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). She helps CAAS scientists improve their experimental design and better incorporate genetic information into their crop breeding.
“I love doing research,” Li said. “I’m a curious person so if I can solve a problem, I feel very happy, but I really want my research to have value – not just for myself – but for the world.”
Huihui Li’s work contributes to Seeds of Discovery (SeeD), a multi-project initiative comprising: MasAgro Biodiversidad, a joint initiative of CIMMYT and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) through the MasAgro (Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture) project and the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize (MAIZE) and Wheat (WHEAT).
Agricultural research for development has tremendous potential for widespread impact in poverty alleviation and food security. However, achieving real benefits for farmers is challenging and many well-intentioned projects fail to achieve large-scale impact. According to Brendan Brown, a postdoctoral research fellow with CIMMYT’s socioeconomics program in Nepal, this is where his work can help.
“There have been decades of work trying to improve agricultural livelihoods, but many of these interventions are yet to have tangible impacts for farmers,” Brown said. “My research seeks to help address this gap, using novel frameworks and applying participatory methods.”
Socioeconomic research at CIMMYT plays a key role at the nexus of agricultural innovations, helping to enhance interventions and initiatives for greater impact. Knowledge from such studies helps to prioritize and target resources, optimizing research capacity and accelerating the uptake of innovations.
“I attempt to understand constraints and opportunities at various scales from farms all the way up to institutional levels,” Brown explained. “I then seek to find pathways to catalyze change that lead to improved farmer livelihoods. Such research is integral to getting agronomic research into farmers’ fields.”
This area of research calls for a mixture of qualitative and quantitative tools and expertise, for which Brown is well suited. He has a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Science with a major in Soil Science. “However, after working in agricultural research and development for a few years, I saw a gap in linking agronomy to the contextual realities of smallholder farming, so I opted to pursue a career that bridges the gap between the physical and social sciences.”
A desire to help
Brown grew up in Australia, between Sydney and a family farm on the south coast of New South Wales. He enjoyed being outdoors, “preferably barefoot,” participated in hobby farming, and from an early age showed an interest in social justice issues. A career aptitude test taken towards the end of high school revealed he was suited to be one of three things: a ship captain, a nurse or an agricultural scientist. He opted for the latter.
It was at university that Brown gained the insight of applying his agricultural knowledge to helping smallholder farmers. During a backpacking trip from Cape Town to Cairo, which incorporated some agricultural volunteering, he witnessed first-hand the difficulties farmers face in sub-Saharan Africa. Upon returning to his studies, he resolved to pursue a career that would enable him to help smallholders and, at the same time, address some of the world’s biggest ethical dilemmas.
Research with impact
Newly graduated, Brown worked with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), based in Canberra, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), based in Ghana, where he gained hands-on experience working in agricultural systems in developing countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It also inspired his PhD, which explored the disconnect between development work at research stations and the reality experienced by African farmers.
“During my PhD, I collaborated with CIMMYT through the Sustainable Intensification of Maize Legume Systems in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA) initiative. I developed a more nuanced approach to what ‘adoption’ actually means in terms of uptake and impact assessments. I also studied communities’ attitudes to conservation agriculture practices and diagnosed key institutional bottlenecks within research and extension systems.”
Brown’s studies allowed him to develop novel mixed methods and participatory impact pathways to promote new farming practices, such as conservation agriculture, to smallholder farmers in Africa. “My work with CIMMYT allows me to contribute to solving some of the world’s biggest issues. Through interacting with smallholders, facilitating conversations and creating new understanding, I hope to contribute to real change.”
Brendan Brown (left) during a field visit.
Moving to Asia
After spending nearly a decade in and out of Africa, he joined the CIMMYT team in Nepal earlier this year and is relishing the opportunity to explore new contexts in South Asia.
“So much potential exists within the food systems of South Asia given the existence of multiple cropping seasons and diverse markets, as well as exciting developments in the use of mechanization and irrigation that have potential for delivering large-scale benefits, driving improved food security and profits.” However, he points out the integration of such innovations in this part of the world can be challenging due to inherent complex social hierarchies and caste systems. “I still have much to learn within such complex systems.”
Brown’s work in South Asia focusses on understanding the adoption, scaling and impact of sustainable intensification technologies and practices. He is primarily working with the Sustainable and Resilient Farming Systems Intensification (SRFSI) initiative, which aims to reduce poverty by making smallholder agriculture more productive, profitable and sustainable while safeguarding the environment and involving women in agriculture.
By studying the portfolio of CIMMYT-led initiatives in the region, he is also developing his understanding of prevailing sustainable intensification practices and the issues farmers face when implementing them. In addition to his work with SRFSI, Brown is soon to embark on a new ACIAR-funded research project aiming to enhance sustainable mechanization of farming systems in two provinces of Nepal by mobilizing strategic planning and collaboration.
“I look forward to sitting down with local agricultural service providers to understand how they run their businesses and how they structure their livelihoods,” Brown expressed. “This will then be paired with the perspectives of farmers, as well as extension officers, researchers and policymakers to build theories of change and pathways to maximize the uptake and impact of sustainable intensification practices.”
He highlights how local ownership of change can be fostered by implementing participatory methods during this process. This can result in transformative change, felt from the institutional level all the way to the smallholder farmer. Brown hopes his work in South Asia will deliver widespread impact for smallholder farmers and he welcomes collaboration and sharing of ideas and approaches with others working towards similar objectives.
