Christopher W. Clark, the engineer-biologist who heads the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell, has been named to the newly established Imogene Powers Johnson Senior Scientist chair at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Funded by a $2 million endowment from the S.C. Johnson family, the named chair honors a longtime supporter of the laboratory's education and conservation efforts.

"For two decades, Gene Johnson has given much of herself to the lab," said John W. Fitzpatrick, the Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. "She has been a guiding force behind the laboratory's education programs since she first joined the administrative board in 1980. Gene is a stalwart and always ready-to-help friend to lab staff, fellow administrative board members and the lab membership." Fitzpatrick noted in particular a 1987 symposium, hosted by Imogene Johnson at the Johnson Foundation's "Wingspread" headquarters in Racine, Wis., that resulted in unprecedented international cooperation in avian studies and conservation.

Fitzpatrick said the new chair "is key to the long-term success of the Lab of Ornithology, providing the core funds for excellent leadership and promoting a new and growing discipline, bioacoustics research, at the university."

Considered one of the world's leading facilities for the study of animal communication, the Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) specializes in developing and applying new techniques for recording and analyzing natural sounds. Computer programs developed at the program are used by scientists at Cornell and elsewhere to study how and why animals communicate and to monitor the health of wildlife populations. BRP developed Canary, a software program used throughout the world by scientists who study the sounds of birds and other animals, and BRP scientists are now pioneering new techniques for taking census of and tracking wildlife with arrays of microphones placed in natural environments.

Clark joined the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in 1987, after serving as a postdoctoral associate and assistant professor at Rockefeller University. He holds a B.Sc. in biology, B.E. in engineering, M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in biology, all from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is best known for his research using passive acoustic techniques in observations of marine mammals. As a senior scholar in the Section of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell, Clark lectures in biology classes and teaches Biology 496, "Bioacoustic Signals in Animals and Humans."