Jeremy Guest, the new Director and iSEE Levenick Professor at the Levenick Center for a Climate-Smart Circular Bioeconomy.
A first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary center focused on creating a climate-smart circular bioeconomy is poised for significant growth, with the appointment of a director, two endowed professorships, and a major campus commitment to hire four new faculty in departments across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Jeremy Guest, Associate Director for Research at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) and award-winning Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, has been selected as Director and iSEE Levenick Professor at the new Levenick Center for a Climate-Smart Circular Bioeconomy at Illinois. iSEE recently received a $10 million gift from Stuart L. and Nancy J. Levenick to establish the Center in collaboration with the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES).
ACES Levenick Professor Kaiyu Guan.
In his research, Guest explores resource recovery, biomanufacturing, and systems analyses to advance the circular bioeconomy and achieve equitable, healthy, and prosperous communities while enhancing the ecosystems that support them.
“It’s an honor to serve as the inaugural Director of the Levenick Center, which represents a bold and transformative investment in the future of our university and region,” Guest said. “The Levenick Center will act as a catalyst for interdisciplinary collaborations and cross-sector partnerships to accelerate society’s transition to a more sustainable, circular bioeconomy.”
Kaiyu Guan, Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at ACES and Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at iSEE, has been chosen as the ACES Levenick Professor. Guan is a prolific researcher known internationally for his work using agroecosystem sensing and modeling to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Growth of this Levenick Center will be supported by an interdisciplinary “cluster hire” of four new faculty under a Special Hiring Initiative by the campus. These faculty will be hired in the following departments: NRES, the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE), and the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering in ACES; and the Department of Plant Biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS). The Levenick gift will provide startup funding for these faculty who will be affiliated with the Levenick Center.
“This new center and faculty hires will make the University of Illinois an unquestioned leader in research and education on a climate-smart circular bioeconomy (CCB). It will nucleate a campuswide research and education program specifically designated for CCB scholarship,” said iSEE Director and Alvin H. Baum Family Fund Chair Madhu Khanna, ACES Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics.
The Levenick Center will foster interdisciplinary research and education to support the transition to a circular bioeconomy – a holistic approach to production where waste from one sector can be used productively in another to keep materials in use longer, reduce the need to extract finite natural resources, and displace fossil fuels. A circular bioeconomy would replace the current “take-make-waste” approach with a system that reduces, recycles, recovers, and reuses waste – catalyzing a future in which biological resources are transformed into food, feed, energy, and biomaterials.
The center’s work will address pressing concerns about the depletion of natural resources, air and water pollution, the buildup of plastics in our oceans, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity.
“The transition from fossil carbon to renewable carbon feedstocks has the potential to support development across the rural-to-urban continuum in the Midwest and broader U.S., helping shift our national trajectory toward a sustainable, safe, and secure bioeconomy,” Guest said.
This complex transition will require breakthrough science that bridges disciplines as well as a solutions-oriented mindset among economists, social and environmental scientists, biologists, and engineers, Khanna said. The new faculty will be affiliated with the Levenick Center and iSEE, benefiting from interdisciplinary team science and seed funding opportunities. The cluster hire will enhance research synergies at iSEE and across campus, fostering innovative ideas and transferring knowledge to the real world for public well-being, economic benefit, resiliency, and sustainability. It will also create educational experiences for students interested in sustainable design, economics, policy, climate change mitigation and adaptation, biotechnology, and environmental science.
“The visionary Levenick Center represents an exciting opportunity to draw on existing campus strengths and further develop cross-disciplinary partnerships toward a more sustainable future,” said College of ACES Dean and Robert A. Easter Chair Germán Bollero. “Further, the investments in scholars like Kaiyu Guan and Jeremy Guest, who embody the forefront of innovation in this space, will transform bioeconomies in ways we can’t even imagine.”
The Levenick Professorships for Guest and Guan are based on their accomplishments and contributions to iSEE and their respective colleges.
Guest’s research focuses on sustainable sanitation and nutrient recovery in both developing and technologically advanced communities, as well as technologies that advance the sustainability of agriculture and the conversion of plants to bioproducts, biofuels, and nutritious foods. He is the sustainable design lead for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), a $262.5M Bioenergy Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Paul L. Busch Award from the Water Research Foundation, and the 2021 James J. Morgan Environmental Science & Technology Early Career Award for creativity and leadership in his field.
“Grainger Engineering has long been a leader in sustainability research, technological innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration with real-world impact,” said Grainger Engineering Dean Rashid Bashir. “With his deep expertise in advancing sustainable technologies and his proven leadership in pioneering research that bridges engineering, environmental science, and public policy, Prof. Guest is uniquely equipped to drive the transformation toward a sustainable future.”
Guan is also the Blue Waters Professor of Supercomputing at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Chief Scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium, NASA’s flagship program for advancing U.S. agricultural research. Guan is at the forefront of monitoring and modeling agroecosystems for food security and environmental sustainability. His team recently developed a “system-of-systems” framework to quantify agricultural productivity and environmental impacts at scale and low cost. He has also created tools to help farmers make informed decisions about sustainable practices. Guan has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, NASA New Investigator Award, American Geophysical Union (AGU) Early Career Award in Global Environmental Change, and FoodShot Global GroundBreaker Prize. Guan was recently awarded the distinguished James B. Macelwane Medal by the AGU and became an AGU Fellow.
“This great honor goes to our whole team and collaborators – a testament of our campus’s commitment to interdisciplinary research. The Levenick Center’s generous support will further advance our research to help the farming industry and the economy as a whole transition to be more sustainable and resilient,” Guan said. “This work builds on the University of Illinois’ mission of transforming lives and serving society by putting knowledge to work with excellence.”