8 November 2013 Lincoln University announces new professors

Lincoln University’s Vice-Chancellor, Dr Andrew West has awarded new professorships to four of the University’s academic staff members.

The awards are part of a selection process which commenced with a Call for Professors in August this year, the first call since 2010. At the Vice-Chancellor’s request a select committee was established to consider the applications, after which an interview process was conducted for short-listed candidates.

The new professors are:

Professor Jacky Bowring, Faculty of Environment, Society and Design

Professor Jacky Bowring is Head of the School of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University. Her key areas of interest are design critique, design theory and landscapes of memory. She has published widely in national and international academic and professional journals, and is the author of A Field Guide to Melancholy (2008) and the editor of Landscape Review. 

Professor Bowring is a registered landscape architect, with success in a number of national and international design competitions: finalist in the Pentagon Memorial Competition (with Room 4.1.3); two Cavalier Bremworth Awards for excellence in unbuilt architecture; three times winner AAA Panasonic Urban Gaze Urban Design competition; winner of the Holy Trinity Memorial Garden (Auckland); and member of the winning team, NZ Wood, for the 48 Hour Design Challenge for the Christchurch post-quake rebuild.  

Professor Jon Hickford, Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Professor Jonathan Hickford has an international reputation for his development of gene-marker tests for livestock breeding. The group he leads was the first in the world to provide this technology to sheep breeders. The gene tests are now used in 11 countries, have earned significant revenue as a New Zealand business, and over the years have saved the livestock industries millions of dollars.

Professor Hickford is regularly invited to speak at conferences around the world in areas such as biotechnology and livestock science, and is involved in a number of large international research projects. 

In the last six years Professor Hickford has submitted a substantial quantity of scientific papers in some of the world’s most prestigious and prominent international journals, averaging over 10 internationally refereed publications every year. 

Currently Professor Hickford is developing genetic tools to improve livestock growth rates and carcass meat yield; technologies that will add immense value to the red meat export industry.

Professor Hickford is also a Past-President of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science.

Professor Geoff Kerr, Faculty of Environment, Society and Design

Professor Geoff Kerr is an acknowledged international expert in non-market valuation, from which he has provided national leadership, developed methods, provided training, and affected policy through contributions to resource consenting, water conservation order, regional planning and Environment Court proceedings.

Professor Kerr has delivered an extensive list of peer reviewed publications and presented at national and international conferences (as well as hosted two extremely successful nonmarket valuation conferences for international audiences). He has authored over 40 of the 177 studies in the New Zealand Nonmarket Valuation Database, which he developed and maintains.

Another theme in Professor Kerr’s research has been time series monitoring of environmental perceptions in New Zealand. These results have been utilised by government departments and by the OECD in its reporting on New Zealand’s environmental performance.

Professor Kerr was co-editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AJARE) from 2010-2013 and remains an associate editor. He is a committee member of the New Zealand Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (NZARES).

Professor Sandhya Samarasinghe, Faculty of Environment, Society and Design

Professor Sandhya Samarasinghe graduated with a Mechanical Engineering (Hons) degree from Russia and MS and PhD in Engineering from Virginia Tech USA. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Artificial Intelligence/Expert Systems at the Centre for Computing and Biometrics (CCB) at Lincoln University. 

Professor Samarasinghe was awarded by Transpower NZ the largest industrial grant even given to a New Zealand University by New Zealand Industry to research, develop and install intelligent automated computational systems to diagnose faults and control the New Zealand power network. This 11 year partnership produced several innovations and received a number of awards. 

She extended her research on Intelligent Computing and Neural Networks to Engineering and Applied Sciences and published the book Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering – From Fundamentals to Complex Pattern Recognition (2006), which has received international recognition. 

Professor Samarasinghe has published over 180 refereed publications, is an Editor of Frontiers in Genetics (part of Nature Publishing Group), and delivered keynote talks at prestigious gatherings, including UNESCO.  

Her current research is in Integrated Systems Modelling involving Neural Networks and Intelligent Computing to address complex problems from an integrated/holistic systems perspective.  These include Systems Biology and a dynamical systems approach to understanding and managing complex water/environmental systems. 

She established and heads the Integrated Systems Modelling Group at Lincoln University and is a founding member of the Centre for Advanced Computational Solutions (C-fACS).  Professor Samarasinghe has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford, UK, since 2008.  She has also been appointed a 6-month Visiting Fellow at Princeton University (USA) and Stanford University (USA) in 2004 and 1998 collaborating with internationally renowned research leaders in computational systems modelling.

Lincoln University Vice-Chancellor, Dr Andrew West acknowledged the new professors long-standing commitment and notable contribution to academic research and teaching in their respective specialist fields and to the University specifically.

“It’s a great honour to award these professorships. These appointments are an acknowledgement of the prodigious output and meaningful contribution these academics have made. Significantly, however, their contribution has not just been in some exclusive, ivory-tower space, but played a genuine role in wider industry and society,” says Dr West.