Illinois environmental scientist wins prestigious ‘genius grant’
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Kaiyu Guan was named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow for his work in agricultural systems and machine learning.
Kaiyu Guan was in Singapore when his phone rang. The screen read: Spam Risk. He blocked the number.He didn’t know the MacArthur Foundation was on the line.“I’m pretty sure they called multiple times,” said Guan, 41, an environmental scientist and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.The foundation came calling because of Guan’s ground-breaking work combining satellite observations, process models and machine learning to build resilient agricultural systems. The MacArthur…
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