
Two Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center geographers have been honored for contributions to science.
Jiquan Chen, a professor of geography at Michigan State University, recently earned the American Association of Geographers', which recognizes a distinguished track record of high-quality research that moves the discipline forward.
In December, Holly Gibbs, a professor with UW–Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, received the American Geophysical Union's Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award, which recognizes "outstanding contributions in research, educational, or societal impacts in the area of global environmental change, especially through interdisciplinary approaches."
Both are co-investigators with the GLBRC, an interdisciplinary hub based at UW–Madison for foundational research to enable the breakthroughs needed for the cost-effective conversion of non-food plants into low-carbon replacements for jet fuel, diesel and other fossil fuels.
Gibbs studies how and why people use land and the associated consequences for the environment and global carbon cycle. Her research combines big data, spatial analysis, remote sensing imagery, and statistical modeling with ground-based information to increase understanding of the causes, patterns, and effects of land use change at the global scale, and particularly of tropical deforestation in Brazil and of cropland expansion in the United States.
Chen studies the coupled effects of global climate change and human activities on terrestrial ecosystems, global change ecology, bioenergy, carbon/water fluxes, and biophysical modeling. His recent GLBRC work has investigated albedo, a measure of how much solar energy is absorbed by ground cover.