Miles Greiner, Wei Yan and G. Richard Scott have been named 2016 Foundation Professors.

The Foundation Professor award was established in 1983 to recognize and salute University professors for their exemplary achievements. Recipients are nominated by their deans and selected by a committee comprised of faculty peers and University of Nevada, Reno Foundation board members and chaired by the University provost. They receive an annual stipend of $5,000 for three years, provided by the Foundation, to further their professional endeavors. Their names will be engraved in the granite pillars of the University's Honor Court.

Greiner, Scott and Yan were recognized during Tuesday's "Honor the Best" ceremony in the Joe Crowley Student Union's Glick Ballrooms.

Greiner, a mechanical engineering professor and interim chair of the department, joined the University in 1986. His research is focused on heat transfer, with expertise in convection augmentation, large-scale fires and nuclear packaging safety.

Greiner is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and has twice received the University's Senior Mentor Faculty Award, as well as the Lemelson Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and professional recognition for outstanding technical papers on the subject of package safety in fire environments.

Greiner is currently developing a graduate certificate in Nuclear Packaging with support from the Department of Energy and is the Lead Science Investigator on more than $1 million of funding for thermal management research for NASA.

Scott, a professor of anthropology, joined the University as a lecturer in 2001. In addition to his teaching and mentoring responsibilities, Scott conducts research in dental anthropology, with a special emphasis on morphological crown and root traits, dental disease, stress and cultural behavior in medieval European civilizations.

His continued research centers on the bioarchaeology of Spanish Basque, Alaskan Inuit and Greenlandic Norse populations. He has authored several books and dozens of journal articles on a variety of subjects in dental morphology and anthropology.

Scott has served as the president of the Dental Anthropology Association and has assisted law enforcement with dental forensic analysis in both Alaska and northern Nevada.

Yan, a professor of physiology and cell biology, established his lab at the University of Nevada School of Medicine in 2004. His research addresses the molecular mechanism of reproduction and fertility control.

He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters, serves as an associate editor for the journals Biology of Reproduction and Environmental Epigenetics and is a member on the editorial boards of three international scientific journals.

He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Society for the Study of Reproduction's Young Investigator Award and the Nevada System of Higher Education Regents' Rising Researcher Award in 2009, the American Society of Andrology's Young Andrologist Award in 2012, and the Nevada Healthcare Hero Award for Research and Technology in 2013.