The Agricultural and Applied Economics Association recently presented awards to eight faculty members and a graduate student in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics:

• Richard Sexton (professor and chair) — Distinguished teaching award, graduate level, more than 10 years of experience.
• J. Edward Taylor (professor) and a co-author — Quality of communication award, for “Beyond Experiments in Development Economics: Local Economy-Wide Impact Evaluation.”
• Colin Carter (professor), Richard Howett (professor emeritus), Alan Olmstead (professor emeritus) and five co-authors — Quality of communication, honorable mention, for “Climate Change: Challenges to California’s Agriculture and Natural Resources.”
• Julian Alston (professor) and two co-authors — Publication of enduring quality award, for “Science Under Scarcity: Principles and Practice for Agricultural Research Evaluation and Priority Setting."
• Aaron Smith (associate professor), Daniel Sumner (professor) and a co-author — American Journal of Agricultural Economics’ outstanding article, “Crop Supply Dynamics and the Illusion of Partial Adjustment.”

The association presented an award for outstanding doctoral dissertation TO UC Davis’ Anil Bhargava, for “Agriculture, Poverty and Natural Resource Conservation in 21st-Century India: Impact Evaluation and Analysis of Rural Development Policy.”

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Jiang

The National Institute of Statistical Sciences has presented one of its two inaugural Former Postdoc Achievement Awards to Professor Jiming Jiang, Department of Statistics.

Jiang spent a summer as a postdoctoral associate at the NISS after he earned his Ph.D. in statistics at UC Berkeley in 1995.

The NISS, in selecting Jiang to receive a Former Postdoc Achievement Award, cited his distinguished career and excellence in leadership through research, education and as a role model for the profession of statistics.

Jiang joined UC Davis in 2001 and served as the director of the Statistical Laboratory from 2004 to 2007.

He is particularly well known for his work on mixed-effects models, the subject matter of his first book. Mixed-effects models are used when researchers examine data sets that are strongly linked together, such as blood samples collected from different people over time, or multiple online purchases made by different customers. Jiang also researches how to develop better and more accurate statistical models.

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Nine UC Davis faculty members are on the Thompson Reuters information service company’s 2015 list of “Highly Cited Researchers.” The 3,125 researchers on the list are among “the world’s most influential scientific minds,” according to Thompson Reuters.

The UC Davis honorees:

• Howard V. Cornell, professor emeritus, Department of Environmental Science and Policy
• Michael S. Denison, professor, Department of Environmental Toxicology
• Jonathan A. Eisen, Genome Center, and Department of Evolution and Ecology
• Oliver Fiehn, professor, Genome Center, and Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
• Susan P. Harrison, professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy
• Robert J. Hijmans, associate professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy
• Biswanath Mukherjee, professor, Department of Computer Science
• Pamela C. Ronald, professor, Department of Plant Pathology
• Qi Zhang, associate professor, Department of Environmental Toxicology

Thompson Reuters uses its Essential Science Indicators tool to compile the list. The tool identifies “highly cited papers,” those ranking among the top 1 percent of most cited papers by subject and year of publication, “earning them the mark of exceptional impact.”

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Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of faculty and staff awards, for publication in Laurels. Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.

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