USA
April 3, 2024

Today, the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced the 11 recipients of the 2023 New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award (New Innovator Award), an award granted to early-career scientists supporting research in one of FFAR’s Research Priority Areas. The New Innovator Awardees’ promising research is opening new avenues of knowledge to deliver groundbreaking solutions to difficult challenges.

FFAR’s New Innovator Award provides early-career scientists with funding to conduct food and agriculture research without the pressure of securing additional funding. Cumulatively, the recipients are receiving a total of $4,818,715 over three years.

Addressing the present and future challenges that the U.S. food and agricultural industry faces requires a dynamic and highly skilled scientific workforce. As such, strengthening the scientific workforce is one of FFAR’s priorities. This year’s winners are conducting bold research, and we are pleased to invest in their careers.
Saharah Moon Chapotin, Ph.D.
Executive Director

The following individuals received a 2023 New Innovator Award. The New Innovator Award page includes full summaries of their research projects.

• Dr. Leigh Archer, Rodale Institute
  Establishing Viable Organic Orchard Crop Systems for the Northeast U.S.
• Dr. Ahmed Badran, The Scripps Research Institute
  Next-Generation Carbon Capture for Agricultural Crop Applications
• Dr. Yifan Cheng, Virginia Tech
  Orthogonal Nano-Engineering (ONE) for Rational Design of Food Contact Surfaces
• Dr. Kiran Gadhave, Texas A&M AgriLife Research
  Using A Novel RNA Therapy to Tackle the Dual Threat of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus, a Pandemic Agricultural Pathogen, and its Supervector, Thrips
• Dr. Rachel Hestrin, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  Harnessing Mycorrhizal-Microbial Synergies for Agricultural Resilience and Health
• Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, University of Arizona
  The Revitalization of Indigenous Crops in the Southwest
• Dr. Margaret Krause, Oregon State University
  Big Data to Improve and Sustain Wheat End-Use Quality in the Face of Increasingly Variable Climate Scenarios
• Dr. Zhaoxu Meng, Clemson University
  Advancing the Design and Fabrication of Biopolymer-based Nanocomposites for Sustainable Food Packaging
• Dr. Yujin Park, Arizona State University
  Developing Circular Urban Food Systems for a Rapidly Growing Desert City
• Dr. Subhashni Raj, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
  Food Security in the Anthropocene in Islander Communities
• Dr. Itamar Shabtai, Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station Research Foundation Inc.
  Evaluating the Use of Calcium Silicate Amendments to Manage the Bioavailability of Organic Carbon in Agricultural Soil

On average, FFAR garners $1.40 in match for every federal dollar allocated. FFAR uses the overmatch, the funding garnered on top of the 1:1 match, to fully fund the New Innovator Award program. Eliminating the matching requirements opens this award program to a broader pool of applicants. However, some recipients secured $143,032 in additional matching funds for a total $4,961,747 investment.

Website: http://foundationfar.org/

Published: April 4, 2024