EAST LANSING, Mich. – Two Michigan State University professors who conduct international research with hyenas and pandas are among 187 winners of the 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships, awarded to artists, scholars and scientists for distinguished past achievements and exceptional promise of future accomplishments.
The MSU faculty members are Kay Holekamp, professor of zoology, and Jianguo “Jack” Liu, Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. Both are faculty members in the Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Program.
“Kay and Jack are outstanding scholars, and their research sheds new light on aspects of nature that are both fascinating and important for understanding the natural world in which we live and on which we depend,” says Richard Lenski, director of the Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Program. “We are truly delighted to have these colleagues recognized for their outstanding research and scholarship.”
Holekamp will use the fellowship to write a book and do research at the University of California, Berkeley, which has a facility housing about 50 hyenas for study purposes. Her research investigates the development of role-reversed sex differences in behavior and morphology in mammals. She also is conducting a long-term behavioral field study in Kenya of spotted hyenas to determine how social, ecological and physiological variables interact during early development in mammals.
Holekamp has been a faculty member in the zoology department since 1992. Her many other honors and awards include a Searle Scholarship (1994-98) and a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (1993-99). She received her doctorate in 1983 from the University of California, Berkeley.
For nearly 20 years, Holekamp’s work on hyenas has been continuously supported by the National Science Foundation. Her research has been profiled by the BBC, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and CNN.
Liu will be using the award to write a book titled “Pandas, People, and Policies” that will synthesize his 10 years of research in China’s Wolong Nature Reserve.
Liu’s research interests include conservation and landscape ecology, systems modeling and simulation, and the effects of human population and activity on endangered species such as the giant panda in China. He is keenly interested in integrating ecology with socioeconomics as well as human demography and behavior for understanding biodiversity across ecosystems.
He has been on the MSU faculty since he completed his postdoctoral study at Harvard University in 1995. In recognition of his efforts and achievements in research, teaching and public service, Liu has been given a number of awards, including NSF's CAREER Award, Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship from the Ecological Society of America, Lilly Teaching Fellowship, and MSU’s Teacher-Scholar Award.
Fellowship winners of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation competition were selected from 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7.5 million. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $247 million in fellowships to more than 16,000 individuals. The grants are made freely with no special conditions so that fellows can work with as much creative freedom as possible.
The Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Program at MSU is a multidisciplinary graduate program of study and research. It is affiliated with 13 departments, including the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Department of Zoology.
For more information, visit the following Web sites:
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation at http://www.gf.org
Kay E. Holekamp Lab at http://hyenas.zoology.msu.edu
Panda Habitat Research in China at http://www.panda.ur.msu.edu/
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