Purdue Professor Wins $250,000 World Food Prize

Gebisa Ejeta, an agronomy professor at Purdue University, was named today as the winner of the 2009 World Food Prize, a $250,000 award, for his work to develop sorghum hybrids that are resistant to both drought and a type of parasitic weed, Striga, that is devastating to crops in Africa.

According to the World Food Prize Foundation, an organization in Iowa that presents the award, Mr. Ejeta’s research has increased the production of sorghum, one of the world’s principal grains, and thereby has helped feed hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Mr. Ejeta, who is 59, was born in Ethiopia but traveled to Purdue for his graduate studies in the 1970s. He ended up staying in the United States and joining the Purdue faculty after a revolution and civil war prevented him from returning to Ethiopia.

The World Food Prize was created in 1986 based on an idea by Norman E. Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning agricultural researcher. Mr. Ejeta will receive his prize at a ceremony in Iowa in October. He is the second Purdue researcher in two years to receive the prize. Philip E. Nelson, a professor of food science, won the 2007 award. —Andrew Mytelka