ORHS grad and National Academy of Sciences member to speak Wednesday on food research at Berkeley

Krishna Niyogi, a 1982 Oak Ridge High School graduate who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, will give a virtual talk on Wednesday, June 23, on “Understanding photosynthesis to improve crop productivity.” He will deliver the Dick Smyser Community Lecture at 7:00 p.m., which is open to the public and sponsored by Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Smyser was the first editor of The Oak Ridger and an active member of FORNL. You can access the Zoom link by clicking on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website.
Niyogi is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California at Berkeley and a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The Niyogi Lab studies photosynthetic energy conversion and its regulation in algae and plants. The lab’s long-term research goals are to understand how photosynthesis works, how it is regulated, and how it might be improved to help meet the world’s needs for food and fuel.
Niyogi discovered the genetic mechanisms by which green plants cope with receiving excessive sunlight. He found that plants have a line of defense (nonphotochemical quenching, or NPQ) that enables them to release the extra light energy as heat. In 2001, Niyogi received the Melvin Calvin Award from the International Society of Photosynthesis Research in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the understanding of mechanisms of “photoprotection” in plants and algae.
Niogi holds a B.A. degree in biology from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also performed research at the Carnegie Institution.
Kris Niyogi is the son of the late Salil Niyogi and Audrey Stevens, both scientists in ORNL’s old Biology Division. His mother was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 for independently demonstrating the synthesis of RNA in E. coli bacterial cells by an enzyme called RNA polymerase.