The Rutgers plant biologist James Simon was elected to the 2025 Class of the National Academy of Inventors
December 11, 2025
When basil crops across the United States began collapsing 15 years ago, farmers were desperate. A mysterious strain of downy mildew began wiping out crops with no treatments, no way to stop the disease from spreading and no basil varieties that were resistant to the destructive plant disease.
That’s when James Simon, Rutgers Distinguished Professor in the department of Plant Biology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS) organized a team that spent more than a decade identifying the pathogen, developing a solution and breeding the first downy-mildew-resistant basil varieties that are now grown worldwide.
“One year after another the disease, which was first identified in Florida and came up to New Jersey, did significant damage to commercial farmers,” Simon said. “With my colleagues, it took us over 10 years of intense work, for which I am very proud, to have developed and released the first basil downy-mildew-resistant varieties that have been grown all over the world.”
The achievement remains a celebrated agricultural breakthrough. As a result of his cutting-edge plant breeding research on basil and many other food crops and discoveries that impact human health, Simon was elected to the 2025 class of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), one of the highest honors for academic innovators.