April 5, 2012

SNRE Professor Joan Iverson Nassauer has received the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the Rackham Graduate School. The award honors senior faculty who consistently demonstrate outstanding achievements in scholarly research and/or creative endeavors; teaching and mentoring of students and junior faculty; service; and other activities that bring distinction to themselves and the University of Michigan.

Nassauer joined SNRE's Landscape Architecture program in 1997. She is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture and the International Association for Landscape Ecology. She and the other recipients will be recognized October 2012 at a private reception and dinner hosted by President Mary Sue Coleman and Provost Phil Hanlon.

Here is what Rackham had to say in announcing her honor:

Joan Iverson Nassauer, landscape architect and landscape ecologist, has spearheaded the field of ecological design, investigating how human perceptions and preferences affect and are affected by ecological function. Her designs for metropolitan communities and agricultural landscapes employ her research on the cultural acceptability of landscape patterns, which have changed the way land is designed and used around the world.

At a time when ecological research and investigations of landscape preference focused on pristine nature, Professor Nassauer pioneered the development of visual assessment concepts for human-dominated landscapes, beginning with the agricultural landscapes of Iowa.  An early discovery and continuing theme of her research is that evidence of human care in the landscape has a powerful normative effect on human behavior to change landscapes. Expanding her research to metropolitan landscapes, she developed and employed visualization technologies that allowed her to test human response to alternative future scenarios that could enhance ecosystem services.. She successfully applied these methods to affect agricultural policy, urban and exurban development, and the redevelopment of vacant urban neighborhoods and brownfields.

Professor Nassauer is the author or co”author of more than 60 articles and 20 books and monographs. Two of the most notable are: Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology (Island Press, 1997), which discusses urban design and ecology,  and  From the Corn Belt to the Gulf: Assessment of Alternative Agricultural Futures (Resources for the Future Press, 2007), co-authored with Mary Santelmann and Don Scavia,  which discusses how agriculture in the American Midwest affects the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

Among the numerous courses Professor Nassauer has developed and teaches is Ecological Approaches to Brownfield Redevelopment, which prepares students to work in interdisciplinary teams to develop innovations that change the landscapes of aging cities. She has advised nearly 40 students working on theses and dissertations. In 2008, appreciative students honored her with their invitation to present the inaugural “last lecture”  of the School of Natural Resources and Environment Student Government.

Professor Nassauer serves as a director of the national socio-environmental synthesis center (SESYNC).  She is a founding member and past-president of the U.S. Section of the International Association for Landscape Ecology, and currently chairs the group’s Taskforce on Public Policy. She is secretary of the National Academy of Environmental Design and serves on the editorial boards of several journals and book series.

The International Association for Landscape Ecology honored her as its Distinguished Scholar, and the US landscape ecology association named her Distinguished Landscape Ecologist and Distinguished Practitioner, the only person to have achieved both distinctions.  Her many design awards include the Federal Highway Administration’s National Environmental Excellence Award for highway visual assessment system and an Environmental Protection Agency award for rainwater gardens in Maplewood, Minnesota. Twice, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has honored her with its National Merit Award for Research. She is a fellow the ASLA and of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.

The University is proud to recognize her contributions as a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of landscape architecture and ecology with the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award. 

Other 2012 recipients are:

• Eva Feldman, Russell N. DeJong Professor of Neurology
• Theodore Goodson III, Richard Barry Bernstein Collegiate Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Macromolecular Science and Engineering
• Georg Raithel, Professor of Physics
• Carl Simon, Professor of Mathematics, Professor of Complex Systems, and Professor of Public Policy

For more on the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, visit the Rackham website.