Two faculty in UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR) were among the world’s most highly cited researchers in 2025.
Yangchao Luo, associate professor of nutritional sciences, and Zhe Zhu, associate professor of natural resources and the environment, are the two CAHNR faculty named to the list.
The 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list, released by Clarivate, uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify individuals from around the world who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their chosen field of research.
The list of Highly Cited Researchers is drawn from the highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science Core Collection database over the past 11 years. The list also identifies the research institutions and regions where they are based.
The methodology that determines the “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate.
Luo has a total of almost 200 publications and has been cited over 12,000 times. His research leverages food engineering, nanotechnology, and machine learning to enhance food safety, quality, functionality, and sustainability. He is actively collaborating with students and colleagues at CAHNR to commercialize technology developed in his lab.
Zhu has published well over 100 articles. He has been cited over 21,000 times and averages approximately 200 citations per paper. His research interests include remote sensing, global environmental change, land cover and land use change, disaster and hazard monitoring, time series analysis, machine learning, biodiversity conservation, and climate change. He actively collaborates with federal agencies like NASA.
This is the sixth year in a row Zhu has been on this list. Luo has been named six times since 2019.
Three additional UConn-affiliated faculty members were also included on the 2025 list, all from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS): assistant research professor Cory Merow, emerita professor Robin Chazdon, and emeritus professor Robert Colwell.
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