Cornell’s Coffman wins new World Agriculture Prize
October 21, 2013 | 05:43 PM
Cornell University plant breeder William R. “Ronnie” Coffman has been awarded the inaugural World Agriculture Prize, awarded by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences (GCHERA), an organization that represents more than 600 universities worldwide, Cornell announced Sunday, the day the prize was scheduled to be awarded at a meeting in Nanjing, China.
Coffman “has sown seeds of scientific and social change across continents and generations,” Cornell, which is based in Ithaca, N.Y., said in a news release.
In the 1970s, Coffman was a rice breeder at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, where he worked on ensuring food security throughout Southeast Asia. Today he is the leader of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative and the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Kingdom Department for International Development.
He is the professor behind Cornell’s Agriculture in Developing Nations course, director of International Programs in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (IP-CALS), and organizer of doctoral training courses at the West African Center for Crop Improvement.
A Kentucky native, Coffman joined the Cornell faculty in 1981, and has served as director of IP-CALS since 2001. Previous positions include chair of the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, CALS associate dean for research and director of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station.
The $50,000 World Agriculture Prize is sponsored by Nanjing Agricultural University, according to a posting by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Coffman has committed the proceeds to AWARE (Advancing Women in Agriculture Through Research and Education), a new initiative to ensure that gender is considered in all IP-CALS activities, from events to funding proposals, Cornell said.
