Jianfei Zhao, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, is among five new recipients of the 2026-2028 DePaul Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, joining colleagues from across the university in this distinctive program.

Hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, the DePaul Humanities Center is committed to inter-disciplinary dialogue and engagement on campus and across the greater community. Through innovative programming and its signature fellowship, the Center – known as the DHC – fulfills its mission to help shape and promote exceptional, thought-provoking work in the arts and humanities.

In this Q&A, Zhao discusses how his work in plant biology intersects with DHC objectives by spurring conversation about socially relevant topics impacting the greater good, from the history of agriculture to social justice, climate education, and more.

What drew you to the fellowship, and what do you hope to accomplish during its term?

I am drawn to this fellowship because it provides an opportunity to fill two related curricular gaps. First, students in the natural and social sciences rarely have a shared curricular space in which to learn how past interactions among plants, technologies, and human societies can inform responses to future challenges. Second, although existing courses address food culture, justice, and environmental challenges, few systematically connect questions of power, labor, trade, and inequality with the biological and ecological realities of crop domestication and contemporary agricultural biotechnology.

These questions have become even more pressing as AI has emerged as a tool to accelerate research by connecting large datasets, predictive models, and experimental systems. In agriculture, these developments particularly influence crop breeding, disease surveillance, precision farming, and climate adaptation—but they also raise enduring humanistic questions about data ownership, expertise, labor, public oversight, and equitable access. I hope to help students examine AI not as an inevitable solution, but as a technology whose purposes and consequences must be shaped through informed critical inquiry, ethical reflection, and public deliberation.

Tell us more about the focus of your fellowship. How will you be exploring the relationship between plant biology and the humanities?

My fellowship examines crop domestication as a process through which plants and human societies continually transform one another. I will focus on biological traits—such as yield, ecological adaptability, nutritional and chemical properties, and responsiveness to human selection—and ask how they have influenced settlement, culture, trade, labor, empire, and environmental vulnerability.

To explore these ideas in the classroom, I will develop an interdisciplinary two-course sequence for non-majors—Food with People and Seeds of Change. Together, the courses will integrate plant biology with the historical, ethical, political, and environmental dimensions of food and agricultural innovation.

Food with People will explore how maize, rice, wheat, and barley shaped civilizations, social structures, and cultural identities. Seeds of Change will examine how sugarcane, tea, coffee, cocoa, and cotton became entwined with colonial expansion, plantation labor, global trade, and persistent inequalities. Students will analyze archaeological evidence, historical documents, maps, botanical illustrations, oral histories, and contemporary research on breeding, genome editing, and precision agriculture. Rather than treating scientific and humanistic evidence as separate forms of knowledge, students will learn to interpret them as complementary perspectives on the same historical processes.

After examining how agriculture has evolved over thousands of years, I will lead students to contemporary debates. A comparative unit on agricultural-biotechnology regulation in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and China will bring these questions into the present. Students will compare how different regulatory systems address uncertainty, risk, public accountability, and innovation in genome editing, precision agriculture, and emerging AI-enabled tools for crop research and farm management, while considering how societies balance scientific progress with ethical responsibility and public good.

What impact—research, academic, or otherwise—do you hope your fellowship will have?

I hope my work through the fellowship will establish a durable model for interdisciplinary education on food, plants, and technological change. More broadly, I hope it will give students across the natural and social sciences a shared language for understanding how biological processes, historical power relations, public policy, and ethical judgment shape agricultural innovation. This can help students become more thoughtful future researchers, policymakers, environmentalists, and civic leaders—able to ask not only whether an innovation works, but for whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences.

Beyond the classroom, I hope the project will extend its impact through a peer-reviewed article on pedagogy at the intersection of plant biology and the humanities. I hope this scholarship, together with guest lectures, curriculum and teaching resources, will offer a pathway for connecting historical understanding with responsible responses to future challenges involving food systems, the environment, and AI-enabled technologies.

You can learn more about the DePaul Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship here .