Dr. Guan’s research is at the frontiers of ecohydrology, remote sensing and modeling of crop production and its response to climate change. His work directly contributes to solving the grand societal challenge of increasing food production and security given the strong constraints on cropping area, available resources and a changing climate. With his group operating with great speed and intensity, he has developed new ways, using solar-induced fluorescence, to quantify the photosynthetic productivity of crops and has extended conventional crop models to include land surface processes, photosynthesis and water stress. Recognizing the lack of seamless and continuous datasets of all the relevant variables needed by these models, he has used supercomputing resources to produce new remote sensing and modeling products that have the potential to revolutionize precision agriculture in both the developed and developing world. Finally, he has developed outreach and web resources to make these tools available directly to farmers.

— Joe Berry
Carnegie Institution for Science
Washington, D.C.

I stand here humbled in receiving this distinguished medal. Thank you, Joe, for the citation and nomination. A heartfelt thanks to Drs. David Lobell, Christian Frankenberg and Lisa Ainsworth, whose belief in my work has been unwavering. I am immensely grateful.Working with David and Joe as a postdoc was transformative — they taught me to aim high and tackle significant issues. David's advice to focus on big problems rather than tenure has been a guiding force for me. David and Joe: You’ve been my greatest inspiration!I owe a deep gratitude to two mentors, Eric Wood and Murugesu Sivapalan (Siva). Eric, my Ph.D. adviser, passed away 2 years ago, but he left us with a legacy of truth and authenticity. His rigorous training and push for me to carve my own path in science shaped me to today. Siva’s guidance has been my lighthouse — reminding me that life is a marathon, not a sprint, and the thrill of science is in blazing new trails. My other mentors — Kelly Caylor, John Kimball, Ming Pan, Evan DeLucia, etc. — you've each uniquely shaped my journey.Our achievements are truly a team effort. What started as two people at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has now blossomed into a vibrant group of over 30 members. To all my students and colleagues, especially Bin Peng, Sheng Wang, Chongya Jiang and Guofang Miao, your intellectual pursuit and hard work are the engine of our success. To our collaborators — Jinyun Tang, Xi Yang, Zhenong Jin, Robert Grant, Ben Runkle and more — we wouldn’t have gotten this far without your huge support!We're in this to revolutionize agriculture, making it both productive and sustainable. I'm energized to continue leading this journey to create transformative changes with lasting impacts. This is like building a skyscraper — laying a deep foundation, big teamwork, and sometimes building the hardest things that sometimes go unnoticed. Thanks, Nick Reinke and the HabiTerre team, for making our work extra meaningful by bringing our innovations to market and scale! This medal from AGU is a powerful encouragement to keep pushing forward and accelerate our efforts! This day holds a special place in my heart, with the presence of my wife, Tingting, and our parents here together. Your unwavering love and support are the bedrock of my strength and resilience.In closing, I dedicate this medal to Eric Wood. Eric, your wisdom and tenacity are imprinted on me. Thank you!— Kaiyu Guan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois

George Ban-Weiss, Rajan Chakrabarty, and Kaiyu Guan will receive the Global Environmental Change Early Career Award at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2018, to be held 10–14 December in Washington, D. C. The award recognizes an early-career scientist “for outstanding contributions in research, educational, or societal impacts in the area of global environmental change, especially through interdisciplinary approach.”  

Dr. Kaiyu Guan is an exceptional early-career scientist who has shown remarkable creativity and maturity, tackling the grand challenge of feeding a growing population under climate change.

Dr. Guan started his training in geography and remote sensing at Nanjing University in China. During his Ph.D. studies at Princeton University, he gained advanced skills and knowledge in remote sensing, Earth system modeling, and high-performance computing. With these tools, he addressed key questions regarding how climate and land surface hydrological processes control vegetation distribution and productivity at the continental scale in Africa and the Amazon. His innovative use of massive satellite data and Earth system modeling revealed fundamental rules of how hydrological variability and cross-season groundwater storage determine tree cover fraction and control seasonal to interannual variability of photosynthesis rates in tropical forest ecosystems.

Kaiyu then took an unconventional path to apply his ecohydrology and computational skills to complex agricultural ecosystems as a postdoc at Stanford University. There he developed new algorithms to use novel satellite-based observations, such as solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, to monitor U.S. crop productivity from space. He also developed a new computational framework to model crop growth in the Earth system models and used it to better assess the climate change impacts on agriculture systems.

Here at the University of Illinois, Dr. Guan has established a truly world-class research program at the frontiers of ecohydrology, climate change, remote sensing, and crop modeling, from local to global scales. I am confident that his research in food security and environmental sustainability will lead to significant advancements in how we monitor and model agricultural systems across the globe under current and future climates. In conclusion, for the excellence of the work he has done and for the promise of much more to come, Dr. Guan fully deserves the GEC Early Career Award.

—Murugesu Sivapalan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I am humbled and deeply honored to receive the 2018 AGU Global Environmental Change Early Career Award. I would like to first thank Drs. Murugesu Sivapalan and Pierre Gentine’s nomination, and I also want to thank AGU and the GEC section in particular for providing such a great platform to nourish Earth system scientists for generations. I feel truly lucky and deeply encouraged. I want to use this opportunity to thank my mentors during different phases of my academic career, including Drs. Eric Wood, Kelly Caylor, David Medvigy, David Lobell, Joe Berry, Murugesu Sivapalan, and Evan DeLucia. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to my long-term collaborators, including Drs. Jin Wu, Xi Yang, John Kimball, Ming Pan, Min Chen, Xiangtao Xu, Jian Peng, Carl Bernacchi, Gary Schnitkey, Stephen Good, Haibin Li, Guofang Miao, and Bin Peng. I also want to share this award with my team and my family. I believe that Earth system science and global environmental change research have reached an era in which we have sufficient high-performance computing resources and rich data to go down to fine spatiotemporal scales to help solve real-life problems. Developing real-world solutions motivates me and my team every day to work on advancing the science and technology to the next level, by standing on giants’ shoulders of what has been achieved before and by working with brilliant minds from various domains. I am a firm believer of “user-inspired basic research” and transdisciplinary cross-fertilization. I hope that in the near future, my team of collaborators can advance science and engineering to the point where we can observe every crop field in real time; monitor crop growth conditions, water demands, and nutrient needs; and achieve cosustainability of the environment and food security for the U.S. corn belt and worldwide. —Kaiyu Guan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign