Professor Jill Farrant Wins Lifetime Achievement at 2025 NRF Awards

Professor Jill Farrant, an accomplished plant molecular physiology scholar, has received the Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 National Research Foundation (NRF) Awards.

The University of Cape Town-based academic described her accolade as the biggest honour she has ever received from her country. “I have fought for this country. I have fought for equality in race and gender, and to have it recognised is really a great honour,” she said. I can’t go without acknowledging all my students, past and present and my collaborators globally and finally to the God of my understanding for showing me my path.”

The 2025 NRF Awards honoured South Africa’s top researchers and scientists at a prestigious ceremony held on 07 August 2025 at the NH Johannesburg Sandton Hotel in Gauteng. Held annually, the awards recognise outstanding achievements made by individuals and teams whose excellence has significantly advanced science for the benefit of society.

Over the course of a distinguished career as a plant molecular physiologist, Prof Farrant has combined scientific excellence with a deep commitment to capacity building, mentorship, and societal impact. Her life’s work, aimed at the improvement of drought tolerance in African crops, has redefined our understanding of this critical field and has contributed to food security in the face of climatic changes on a continent challenged by a future that will be hotter and drier.

Throughout her research, she has used a multidisciplinary systems biology approach to fully understand the fundamental mechanisms and regulation of desiccation tolerance. Her work has led to several important discoveries that have led to breakthroughs such as the genetic modification of maize to improve its tolerance to moderate drought conditions.

Her PhD involved understanding why certain seeds are sensitive to desiccation, precluding their storage for conservation purposes.

She went on to undertake research on unique and rare plants with the ability to tolerate extreme water loss/desiccation, sometimes for months or years, termed resurrection plants. Her later research looked at these resurrection plants and the synergies with root-associated microbes, producing natural biostimulants shown to improve drought tolerance and act as soil regeneration agents. This has led to a reduction in the reliance on chemical fertilisers in degraded soils.

Along the way, she introduced research on “orphan crops”, also sometimes called “forgotten crops”, which have not been bred during the green revolution for increased seed size and yield, the consequences of which were a severely reduced tolerance of water loss due to drought. Such crops are thus inherently more tolerant of drought but still die under severe drought conditions.

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