Penn State Honors Four Eberly College of Science Faculty Members with the Title of Distinguished Professor

Four professors in the Eberly College of Science have been selected to receive the title of Distinguished Professor. They are Dmitri Burago, Teh-hui Kao, Runze Li, and Mark Strikman.

Dmitri Burago Selected to Receive the Title of Distinguished Professor of Mathematics

Dmitri Burago, a professor of mathematics at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the title of Distinguished Professor of Mathematics. Burago was honored with the title in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research, and service to the University community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the Dean.

Burago describes his research as "mathematics with physics thinking." His two most recent publications, appearing in the Annals of Mathematics and the Duke Mathematical Journal, concern inverse problems and tomography, which is the imaging of any kind of penetrating wave, one thin section at a time -- a method used in geophysics, oceanography, materials science, astrophysics, and other sciences. His specialties also include branches of mathematics and physics called dynamical systems, algorithmic complexity, Finsler geometry, combinatorial group theory, and partial differential equations.

In 1997, Burago was the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship and, in 1995, he received Penn State's Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievements. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Geometry and Topology, the Journal of Topology and Analysis, and the Electronic Research Announcements of the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and he has been a member of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical Society since 1992. He has helped to organize mathematical conferences across the United States and abroad, and he has been invited to deliver many lectures at scientific symposia across the world.

Burago has published numerous scientific papers throughout his career in various journals, including the Annals of Mathematics, Geometric and Functional Analysis, the Journal of Geometry and Topology, the Journal of Topology and Analysis. In 2001, he co-authored a textbook A Course in Metric Geometry.

Before joining the Eberly College of Science faculty at Penn State in 1994, Burago was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, a researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, and an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. He received doctoral and master's degrees from Saint Petersburg State University in 1992 and 1986, respectively.

Teh-hui Kao Selected to Receive the Title of Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Teh-hui Kao, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the title of Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Kao was honored with the title in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research, and service to the University community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the Dean.

Kao investigates the molecular basis for cellular recognition and signal transduction during reproduction in flowering plants. His research has been featured on the cover of Nature and was chosen as one of the top 75 science stories in 1994 by Discover magazine. In addition, he is the recipient of the 2008 Excellence in Honors Teaching Award given by the Schreyer Honors College. In 2006, he was honored with a Penn State Graduate Program Chair Leadership Award. In 2011 and in 1998, the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology honored Kao with a Paul M. Althouse Outstanding Teaching Award. In 1998, the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology honored Kao with the Daniel R. Tershak Memorial Teaching Award and, in 1995, Penn State honored him with a Faculty Scholar Medal in Life and Health Sciences.

Kao has presented invited lectures throughout his career in the United States and abroad. He has published numerous papers in scientific journals and he has served on the editorial boards of Botanical Studies, Academia Sinica, Plant Physiology, the Journal of Plant Biology, Sexual Plant Reproduction, and Plant and Cell Physiology. Kao chairs the Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Plant Biology and, until 2006, he was the co-director of the ecological and molecular pant physiology degree option in Penn State's Integrative Biosciences Graduate Degree Program. He has served on the graduate thesis committees of over 70 graduate students throughout his career at Penn State.

Before joining the Penn State faculty in 1986, Kao conducted research at the Roche Institute for Molecular Biology and at Cornell University. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at Yale University in 1980. He earned master of philosophy and master of science degrees in chemistry in 1977 and 1976, respectively. In 1973, he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at National Taiwan University.

Runze Li Selected to Receive the Title of Distinguished Professor of Statistics

Runze Li, a professor of statistics at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the title of Distinguished Professor of Statistics. Li was honored with the title in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research, and service to the University community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the Dean.

Li's research involves several fields of statistics, including high-dimensional data analysis, variable selection, and intensive longitudinal data analysis. Li also studies various statistical applications such as design and modeling for computer experiments, behavioral science, genetic-data analysis, and brain-image analysis.

Li has received various awards and honors in the past. He received a National Science Foundation Career Award in 2004. He was elected to be a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2009, and he was elected to be Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2011. He also received the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award for 2012. He is serving as co-editor-in-chief of Annals of Statistics from 2013 to 2015 with the renowned statistician Peter Hall.

Li has co-authored a book, Design and Modeling for Computer Experiments, and he has written numerous scientific papers published in a wide spectrum of statistical journals including the Annals of Statistics, Biometrics, Biometrika, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (both Series B and Series C), Statistics in Medicine, Statistica Sinica, and Technometrics. He also has published interdisciplinary research works in journals focusing on areas other than statistics such as Psychological Methods, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Prevention Science, Human Genetics, Briefings in Bioinformatics, Neuroimage, the Journal of Chemometrics, Geophysical Research Letters, and Environmental Research Letters.

Li was the chair of the statistical graduate program at Penn  State from 2007 to 2012 and he has served on various committees in the Department of Statistics, the Eberly College of Science, and the University. Li's extensive service to the statistical community includes serving as current co-editor-in-chief of the Annals of Statistics and previously serving as the journal's associate editor from 2007 to 2012. In addition, he served as associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 2006 to 2012, and for Statistica Sinica from 2005 to 2012. He also has helped to organize statistical conferences in the United States and other countries. He chaired scientific-program committees of three international conferences held in Korea, Japan, and China and served as a session organizer and a scientific-program committee member for many other conferences.

In 2000, Li earned a doctoral degree in statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a faculty member at Penn State since 2000. He was promoted to associate professor in 2005 and to professor in 2008.

Mark Strikman Selected to Receive the Title of Distinguished Professor of Physics

Mark Strikman, a professor of physics at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the title of Distinguished Professor of Physics. Strikman was honored with the title in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research, and service to the University community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the Dean.

Strikman is a theoretical physicist whose research focuses on high-energy collisions of electrons and protons with protons and atomic nuclei. He developed new techniques for probing the microscopic structure of nucleons and nuclei using high-energy beams, and he predicted a variety of important new phenomena that emerge at the interface between particle physics and nuclear physics. Many of these predictions now have been confirmed experimentally at high-energy accelerators around the world. He has organized dozens of international workshops in the United States and in Europe, presented invited talks and lectures at scientific symposia across the globe, and published numerous high-impact scientific papers.

Strikman has received many awards throughout his career. In 2013, he was selected as a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) Fellow. In 2009, he became one of only a few researchers to have received a second Humboldt Research Award for Senior Scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany, after having received his first a Humboldt Research Award in 1999 in recognition of his research achievements in investigating the interactions of high-energy particles with atomic nuclei and the hadron class of subatomic particles. In 1997, Strikman was elected to fellowship in the American Physical Society.

Before joining the Eberly College of Science faculty at Penn State in 1992, Strikman was a visiting professor at Penn State, a member of the research staff at the Leningrad Institute of Nuclear Physics, and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He received a professor habilitatus degree and a doctoral degree in 1988 and 1978,  respectively, from the Leningrad Institute of Nuclear Physics, and a master's degree in 1972 from Leningrad University.