Center director honored by AAAS
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Jianguo "Jack" Liu, internationally known for his new ways of exploring the relationships between humans and nature and how those intertwined systems affect the environment, has been named a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Liu is an MSU University Distinguished Professor of fisheries and wildlife who holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability and serves as director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at MSU. He is one of six MSU faculty members named AAAS fellows this year.
Liu was honored for his pioneering research that integrates ecology, various social sciences and policy to understand and achieve environmental sustainability at local, national and global scales. He is known around the world for his work on the relationship between human and natural systems and is the lead investigator of CHANS-Net: Human-Nature Network funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
"This recognition also belongs to the scientific community engaged in the research that joins human and natural systems, including my students and collaborators," Liu said. "I am most grateful to MSU, funding agencies, and numerous friends and colleagues for their generous support over the decades.
"It is very encouraging to see that the interest in human-nature research has been rapidly growing around the world and more people are realizing that understanding the complexity of coupled human and natural systems lays a foundation for achieving global sustainability."
In addition to receiving his fellow certificate and rosette at the AAAS annual meeting in February in Washington, D.C., Liu and other scientists are leading six CHANS-net symposia at the event.
"These symposia address a wide variety of cutting-edge research on CHANS, such as telecoupling of human and natural systems, human decisions in complex human-nature systems, resource use and resilience and sustainability," Liu said. "They bring researchers from various disciplines together to showcase novel insights on exciting frontiers and map future research directions."
Liu has received many honors and awards, such as the Guggenheim Fellowship Award, NSF's CAREER Award, US-IALE's Distinguished Service Award, and the Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship from the Ecological Society of America.
He joins 42 MSU faculty members that have been named AAAS fellows since the tradition began in 1874.
This year 503 AAAS members were named fellows on the basis of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.
