Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra is a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, who studies the genetics and evolution of maize and its wild relatives, integrating genetics, archaeology and evolutionary biology to understand how the crop and human civilizations shaped one another across thousands of years. In a landmark 2023 paper in Science, he and his collaborators reconstructed the origins of modern maize, showing that today's crop descends from a hybrid created more than five thousand years ago in central Mexico, and much of his work uses this evolutionary history to understand how naturally occurring genetic variation could help crops withstand heat, drought and other climate-related challenges. He received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences in 2024 and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.