Kenneth P. Burnham
The Wildlife Society’s highest honor, the Aldo Leopold Memorial Award, was recently awarded to Kenneth P. Burnham, professor emeritus of the department of fish, wildlife, and conservation biology at Colorado State University (CSU). The award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to wildlife conservation.
Burnham began his career as a statistician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and continued as an area statistician for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in the southeast United States. His early research produced a wide variety of statistical methods used by ecologists around the world. These methods had a profound impact on the science behind numerous monitoring programs, including the northern spotted owl, endangered desert tortoise, endangered fish on the Colorado River, salmon passage through hydro dams on the Columbia River, and assistance in planning and conducting the 2000 U.S. Census.
Starting in 1988, and for the next 21 years, Burnham held the position of assistant unit leader for the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at CSU. His work led to effective insights into a broad range of biological systems in many places throughout the world. He is a longtime member and Fellow of the ASA.
The award is named after Aldo Leopold, who is considered the “father” of wildlife science. Following Leopold’s death in 1948, the Wildlife Society has annually awarded an individual the Aldo Leopold Memorial Award in his honor.
Ming Yuan
Ming Yuan, associate professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), was recently awarded the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship for a three-year term.
The Coca-Cola Junior Professorship is supported by a gift from Coca-Cola to support research and development in ISyE. Endowed professorships, such as this one, are awarded to outstanding faculty, ensuring them the resources they need to remain at the forefront of their fields and to lead teaching and research efforts in their key areas.
In addition to this recent honor, Yuan was the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2009 for his exemplary work in sparse modeling and estimation with high-dimensional data. He also was named a Distinguished Cancer Scholar from the Georgia Cancer Coalition in 2007 and was the recipient of the John van Ryzin Award in 2004.
Yuan earned his PhD in statistics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He also holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and information science from the University of Science & Technology of China. Yuan’s current research interests include statistical learning, bioinformatics, and methods of regularization.
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