News & Events

Monday, October 18, 2004

STAR Grantee Honored

WASHINGTON (NCER) - EPA STAR Grantee, F. Jay Breidt, Ph.D., was recently honored with the “2004 Distinguished Achievement Award” from the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistics and the Environment. The Association cited Dr. Breidt "for distinguished research leading to the development of statistical methods for design and estimation in natural resource surveys and the transfer of this expertise to operational environmental surveys, for collaborations in environmental research and for contributions toward training the next generation of environmental scientists."

Dr. Breidt is Associate Chair and Professor of Statistics at Colorado State University, where he joined the faculty in 2001. From 1991 until 2001, Dr. Breidt was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at Iowa State University. He spent 1998 as an ASA/NSF Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Dr. Breidt’s research interests include time series, environmental monitoring and survey sampling. In the area of survey sampling, he has focused on the application of sampling design in environmental resource inventories of large landscapes. While at Iowa State, Dr. Breidt was part of the team that designed and analyzed the US Department of Agriculture’s National Resource Inventory, a nationwide survey of land resources. Currently, he is engaged in research aimed at improving the quality of estimates from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program by combining remote sensing data with existing inventory data. In addition, he is collaborating with scientists at Colorado State’s Natural Resources Ecology Lab on problems of carbon sequestration in agricultural soils.

As a STAR grantee, Dr. Breidt is involved in two EPA-funded projects. He is working with a team led by N. Scott Urquhart, Ph.D., at Colorado State on Applying Spatial and Temporal Modeling of Statistical Surveys to Aquatic Resources and with a team headed by Don Stevens, Ph.D., at Oregon State on a National Research Program on Design-Based/Model-Assisted Survey Methodology for Aquatic Resources. The goal of these projects is the design and analysis of surveys of aquatic resources. Both will expand EPA’s existing Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) design. Dr. Breidt is building on the spatio-temporal models developed by other EMAP investigators by combining probability survey data with existing data and incorporating methods to account for data that are spatially dependent. Ultimately, this will allow for the development of more comprehensive ecological surveys that merge data from many sources.

Dr. Breidt is involved with a new NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program, PRIMES (Program for Interdisciplinary Mathematics, Statistics, and Ecology). He was a principal writer of the proposal for this grant and now serves on the PRIMES Council that directs the program. PRIMES supports graduate students concentrating on quantitative ecology.

In 1997, the Iowa State College of Liberal Arts and Sciences presented Dr. Breidt with its “Early Excellence in Research Award.” He also received the 1990 “James L. Madison Memorial Award” and 1989 “Franklin A. Graybill Award” from the Department of Statistics at Colorado State. Dr. Breidt is a Fellow of ASA. He is Chair of the ASA Committee on Energy Statistics, an advisory group to the Energy Information Administration, the statistics agency of the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Breidt is also Associate Editor for the Journal of Forecasting, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and Environmental and Ecological Statistics.

Dr. Breidt earned his Ph.D. in 1991 and M.S. in 1989 in Statistics from Colorado State. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and English Literature, summa cum laude with honors from the College of Idaho. Dr. Breidt is a Member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, ASA, Mu Sigma Rho, and International Association of Survey Statisticians.

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