CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Kaiyu Guan, the Levenick Professor of Sustainability at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Illinois alumnus Liangfang Zhang have been named 2026 MacArthur Fellows, each receiving what is commonly known as a "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The fellowship includes an unrestricted $800,000 stipend that the recipient can use as they see fit. According to the MacArthur Foundation, the fellows are chosen as "talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits."
Guan’s research is building a predictive science of agriculture by integrating field and satellite observations, process models, artificial intelligence and supercomputing. His integrative approach links what can be observed with the biological and physical processes that govern how crops, soils, water, nutrients, climate/weather and farm management interact. His team has advanced remote sensing approaches that integrate field, airborne and satellite observations to map agricultural resources and processes while improving advanced models to quantify impacts of diverse management practices — from the scale of individual fields to large regions.
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"That science is also moving into major societal impact," Guan said. "We have developed technologies that support crop insurance and agricultural risk management, inform national conservation and policy analysis and help farmers and agricultural partners make more data-driven decisions."
Guan is the founding director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center; a professor of natural resources and environmental sciences; a professor of computing and data science; a professor in the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment; a Blue Waters professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He also serves as chief scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium and founded the agricultural science and intelligence company HabiTerre to help translate research into operational solutions for agriculture at scale.
"I am deeply honored and grateful to be named a MacArthur Fellow. I see this recognition as far bigger than me — it is a powerful platform to champion agriculture, our farmers and the people working together to transform our agri-food system," Guan said. "Agriculture is too important not to bring our best science, technology and talent to it. We need to produce food, support farmers and protect our natural resources — and our work has shown that these goals can be advanced together."
Guan has received numerous honors. He was the 2025 national winner of the agInnovation Research Innovation Award of Excellence, and was named a 2023 American Geophysical Union Fellow with the James B. Macelwane Medal and a 2023 University Scholar of the University of Illinois System. He was awarded the 2022 FoodShot Global Groundbreaker Prize and has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher every year since 2022.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University, China, in 2008 and a master of arts and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2010 and 2013, respectively. He joined the U. of I. faculty in 2016.
"At Illinois, we bring together satellite observations, field and landscape experiments, process science, AI and supercomputing to build a predictive science of agriculture. My long-term goal is ambitious but simple: to monitor, model and help optimize every farm field on the planet," Guan said. "This recognition truly reflects the extraordinary work of our students, researchers, collaborators, mentors and agricultural partners around the world. I hope to use this fellowship as a launching pad to further advance the science, build practical solutions and create lasting value for farmers and society."
Additionally, chemical engineer Liangfang Zhang, who received a Ph.D. from the U. of I. in 2006 in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is among this year’s group of fellows.
