The National Academy of Sciences has awarded Husker plant geneticist James Schnable one of its highest honors for multiple advancements he has achieved in plant science.

“Schnable’s pioneering innovations in plant genomics, quantitative genetics and phenotyping are reshaping how we understand, improve and sustain the world’s major crops,” the organization said in awarding him the 2026 NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences. The honor comes with a medal and a $100,000 prize.

The award recognizes research by a mid-career U.S. scientist who “has made an extraordinary contribution to agriculture or to the understanding of the biology of a species fundamentally important to agriculture or food production.” Past recipients of the award are internationally recognized leaders in fields including genomic studies of plants and animals, food security, animal welfare and pollinator health. 

Schnable, the Nebraska Corn Presidential Chair and professor of agronomy and horticulture, has pioneered and collaborated on a series of landmark research projects, including the complete mapping of the corn genome; a dramatically expedited process for identifying corn gene functions; and a current project to develop the first digital twin of a cornfield. 

Those projects, involving advanced interdisciplinary collaboration, fill in key gaps in scientific understanding and provide opportunities to develop more robust and adaptable hybrids through breeding or gene editing. 

Practical impact for the agricultural sector provides the central guidepost for Schnable’s work.

“We work very collaboratively with people from very different disciplines, from different parts of the U.S.,” he said. “Our team always has to have a very rigorous focus on, does this matter? What is the impact going to be?”

Schnable’s research on plant genetics and breeding for crops including corn and sorghum incorporates technologies and capabilities from engineering, artificial intelligence and statistics. His work provides producers with insights into crop health and improved varieties needing less fertilizer and providing greater stress tolerance.

He has established three companies in bioinformatics, climate-resilient agriculture and precision agronomy, raising more than $7 million in funding from angel and venture investors. 

His research grant awards have topped $30 million, with funding from a range of government agencies and organizations including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, private-sector companies and nongovernmental organizations. Many of his projects are part of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Center for Plant Science Innovation, known for its interdisciplinary work on advanced research in agricultural and food science. 

Schnable is the youngest researcher to receive the NAS award. Past awardees have come from universities such as Cornell, Stanford and the University of California-Davis, which reflects how the university is “competing above our weight class” in this area of science, he said. Many of his former graduate students and postdoctoral candidates are now teaching at universities across the U.S. and abroad, and others are working at major seed companies and ag-tech startups. 

His career at Nebraska has followed an ambitious trajectory. Trained in plant genomics, he has expanded his skill set in ever-wider ways. He developed an additional research program focused on plant phenotyping after Nebraska Innovation Campus made strategic investments in advanced greenhouse and sensor technologies. That work builds on his previous genomics-research experience partnering with computer scientists, statisticians and machine learning experts. 

A few years later, he moved into cornfields.

“I moved from being somebody who just worked at a computer to somebody who also grew plants in a greenhouse and used computers to analyze the images,” he said. “Now my team is running a four-row planter and a tractor, with field trials all across the state, and I’m worrying about grain yields, weed pressure and rainfall.”

As a result, he has become “the person at that interface between the biology and the agronomy, the data science and the artificial intelligence, and being the person who can create the right data sets, ask the right questions, and pull in the collaborators from both of those worlds to answer the really big challenges,” Schnable said.

Those challenges, such as identifying corn-gene specifics or developing new techniques for improved drought tolerance, remain difficult, but Schnable takes heart that “we’re getting to the point where there are things we really can do better.”

Even in today’s high-tech age, walking directly through a field and taking plant measurements by hand remain important. But such work increasingly can be done effectively by robots. Satellite imagery of detailed field conditions demonstrates ever-increasing sophistication and value. The expense of genetic data-crunching in plant science continues to fall.

“In the last five years, the cost of measuring the RNA (genetic details) of each corn plant has gone from $200 to maybe $30,” Schnable said. “Lots of other things get harder, but the quality of the data gets better, the cost gets lower, and the tools for analyzing it are also getting better. It’s really exciting to be living in an era when these things get better every year.”

Agronomy and Horticulture