Gurdev S. Khush

Gurdev Singh Khush is an Indian-born agronomist and geneticist who, working alongside his mentor Henry Beachell, received the 1996 World Food Prize for enlarging and improving the global rice supply during a period of exponential population growth. Born in Punjab, India, he earned a doctorate from the University of California, Davis, and went on to head the Plant Breeding Department at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines for more than two decades. He is credited with playing a key role in developing more than three hundred innovative rice strains, work recognized as central to the high-yielding varieties that revolutionized rice production across Asia.