This years winner is Gebisa Ejeta, a professor of agronomy at
Purdue University. Ejeta hails from Ethiopia and remembers from
his time there the use of the grain sorghum as a staple of the
East African diet. His innovations have multiplied sorghum
yields many, many times over. From USA Today, writer Elizabeth
Weise details Ejeta's work. "A lot of people who grew up it the
Midwest in the '40s and '50s would remember the old syrup for
pancakes, made of milo," as sorghum is sometimes called there,
he says. It's also used to make gluten-free beers for people
with celiac disease. But in Africa and Asia, it's a major grain,
used in porridge and bread, in making beer and popping like
popcorn. Sorghum feeds 500 million to 700 million people
worldwide, Ejeta says. "It's a huge crop in Africa; it's a very
important crop in India. In China it's used for making their
national alcoholic beverage," baijiu, or white liquor. Ejeta,
born in a one-room thatched hut in west-central Ethiopia, walked
12 miles to attend a nearby s