Son EJ Green and father Ed Green share a laugh at the GSNB Spring Awards ceremony. Photo credit: Peter Morin.
Edwin J. (Ed) Green, professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, and Edwin J. (EJ) Green, a doctoral student in philosophy, were both honored at the Spring Awards ceremony of the Graduate School–New Brunswick (GSNB) on April 23.
In fact, the graduate program in Ecology and Evolution scored a trifecta of awards with two graduate fellows also being honored at the annual ceremony. Cara Faillace received the Dissertation Teaching Award to support her teaching of the course “Seminar in Invasion Ecology” while Talia Young received a University and Bevier Fellowship to support her dissertation, Food Webs Matter: Implications of Trophic Interactions Across a Range of Aquatic Systems.
Ed Green, who is also the program director for spatial statistics at the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis at SEBS, won the award for “Excellence in Graduate Teaching.” Son EJ Green won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research for his dissertation, “Seeing the Structure of Objects.”
Julie Lockwood, professor and director of the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolution, nominated Ed Green for the teaching award, praising him for being able to “translate the arcana of Bayesian statistics to real-world end-users like foresters, fisheries and wildlife biologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists, among many others.”
She calls him “an essential mentor to graduate students beyond those for whom he is the primary adviser. Ed’s Bayesian course has tripled in enrollment since its first offering and has moved from a semi-annual course to one taught every year.”
Lockwood added that Edwin “even has a revolving set of graduate student ‘groupies’ asking him to continue meeting with them after his course formally ends. That just never happens, especially not around a statistics professor that teaches a demanding course!”
As a teacher and mentor, he’s outstanding, said Lockwood. “If the measure of our impact as academicians lies mostly in the legacy we leave in student achievements, then Ed Green will be remembered as a superstar.”
Son EJ’s research is at the interface of philosophy and cognitive psychology, having to do with how shape properties are represented in visual perception and the role of shape perceptions in the visual representation of persisting objects. His work has been published in a major journal—unusual for graduate students in Philosophy.
EJ’s adviser Brian McLaughlin, distinguished professor in the Department of Philosophy at the School of Arts and Sciences, considers him the best philosophy of mind student in the history of the Graduate Program in Philosophy program and compares him favorably to earlier graduates who now hold full professorships at major research universities.
“In the years to come, E.J. will become one of the small group of researchers that set the agenda in the field of philosophy of perception.”
L-R: The Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolution is represented by Prof. Ed Green, Director Julie Lockwood, and Graduate Fellows Cara Faillace and Talia Young. Photo credit: Peter Morin.
