Distinguished Lancaster University professor is named world’s top expert in climate processes.

Professor Steve Long FRS was named the Expertscape’s World Expert in Climate Processes, on World Environment Day earlier this week.

This places Steve, a distinguished professor in crop sciences at the Lancaster Environment Centre, in the top 0.1% of scholars writing about Climatic Processes over the past 10 years.

Expertscape is a service that uses a PubMed-based algorithm that objectively ranks persons and institutions according to their demonstrated expertise in more than 27,000 biomedical topics.

“It is an honour to be given the title of World Expert via the Pub-Med-based algorithm. That though reflects the amazing group of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, faculty colleagues and in particular support staff who have all contributed to these publications. I humbly view this as a recognition of the wonderful team that I work with, and have worked with,” said Steve, whose work focuses on increasing crop productivity and sustainability through photosynthesis.

Steve spends much of his time at the University of Illinois, where he is Director of the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project, an international research project led by Illinois, in which Lancaster University is a partner. RIPE aims to engineer crops to be more productive by improving photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yields. RIPE is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, and U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

Steve's research has increased our understanding of how global climate change is affecting plants and is helping to inform approaches to increase crop yields by improving the efficiency of photosynthesis. His expertise ranges from plant molecular biology to in silico crop design and field analyses of the impacts of atmospheric change on crops. Steve’s work at Lancaster University has a particular focus on efficient use of water.

Steve’s work is published in over 300 peer-reviewed journals including Nature and Science. He has also given briefings on food security and bioenergy to the U.S. president, the Vatican, and to Bill Gates. Thomson Reuters recognized Steve as a highly cited researcher in the field of plant and animal science every year since 2005. In 2013, Steve was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the oldest continually operating society that honours leading scientists and engineers.