Genetics professor Zachary Lippman is the winner of the 2020 Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences, announced the National Academy of Sciences on Wednesday. The honor, which includes a $100,000 prize, is awarded annually to a mid-career scientist making extraordinary contributions to agriculture or biology.
The NAS pointed to work by Lippman, a professor of genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on developing hardier crop varieties. He was among 15 people honored by the academy for major contributions to science.
Lippman’s research “has shown that yields can be increased, and new crops can be created and adapted to new environments using the genes that determine when, where, and how many flowers are produced on a plant,” said the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR). “When combined with known hormones that control flowering and the powerful tools of gene editing, this new knowledge allowed Lippman and his team to embark on a new frontier of quantitatively fine-tuning traits in ways that were never before possible, revealing principles that could be applied to all crops to improve productivity.”
The NAS prize is endowed by the FFAR and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.