Dr. Patricio Grassini is Sunkist Distinguished Professor of Agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Patricio holds a degree in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and a PhD in Agronomy from UNL. He is the author of more than 100 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals, including top-tier journals such as Nature Communications, Nature Sustainability, Nature Food and PNAS. He has been included within the top 1% of the Most Cited Researchers in the discipline in the world for the last four years (2019-2022) according to the Web of Science. His research interests focus on yield potential, productivity gaps and resource use efficiency in agricultural systems.
Patricio’s applied research covers a wide range of cropping systems, including rainfed and irrigated cereal crops in South America, the U.S. corn belt and Asia, and oil palm in Southeast Asia. Major ongoing projects include (i) the Global Yield Gap Atlas (www.yieldgap.org), which provides estimates of the differences between actual and potential yields of major cropping systems, (ii) an initiative to improve productivity and reduce the environmental footprint associated with oil palm cultivation by smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia, (iii) a project to study the interactions between cropland and urban areas funded by the US National Science Foundation, and (iv) a global initiative to study the interactions between cropland and urban areas funded by the US National Science Foundation, and (iv) a global initiative to assess potassium limitation in cropping systems supported by the International Fertilizer Association. Dr. Grassini has received the Sunkist Chair in Agronomy, a Fulbright Scholarship and three other fellowships and seven awards, including the Agronomy Society of America (ASA) Early Career Award and the W.L. Nelson Award for Diagnosing Yield-Limiting Factors. Patricio is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Field Crops Research and Global Food Security magazines and Associate Editor of Crop & Environment magazine. Patricio was the 2019 term Chair of the Crop Science Society of America’s Crop Ecology Division.
