2008 Birth Award Winner

The CNIRS is proud to announce this year’s winner of the Gerald S. Birth Award for best published work in 2006-2007 is James Burger. The award and the award lecture will be presented at the 14th International Conference on Diffuse Reflectance at Chambersburg, PA August 2008.

James Burger began his chemometrics career at the University of Washington with Professor Bruce Kowalski, receiving a Masters degree in 1985.  After many years of commercial scientific and business related software development in the Seattle, USA area, he returned to PhD studies in 2002 at Aalborg University, Esberg, Denmark (Kim Esbensen) and  in 2004 at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umea, Sweden (Paul Geladi) focusing on the extension and application of chemometric principles to hyperspectral imaging.  He received his PhD in 2006 with a thesis entitled  “Hyperspectral NIR Image Analysis: Data Exploration, Correction, and Regression”, for which he is receiving  the award. James is the founder and director of two related businesses: BurgerMetrics, Inc, Shoreline WA, USA, and BurgerMetrics SIA, Jelgava, Latvia, offering hyperspectral image acquisition and analysis software as well as general hyperspectral imaging consulting and training services.  He continues to explore novel extensions of chemometrics and the development of interactive software to aid in the interpretation of hyperspectral image data. His interests include both exploratory laboratory systems and online process automation.