The goal of my research is to find ways to increase crop yields substantially on existing farm land without compromising the quality of soil and water resources or damaging the integrity of natural ecosystems – a process called ecological intensification. Current efforts focus on contributing to a global collaboration to develop the Global Yield Gap Atlas (www.yieldgap.org), which provides state-of-the-art estimates of the gap between current average farm yields and the potential yield of major food crops throughout the world. The Atlas supplies essential information to guide development policies and research prioritization at global and national scales while also supporting efforts to identify yield constraints and technologies to overcome them at local to regional levels. Other work seeks to identify and validate metrics for estimating agriculture’s environmental impact that are robust yet parsimonious by “simplifying of the far side of complexity.”