Four Illinois professors have been elected 2018 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including two from the IGB.
Plant biology professors Andrew Leakey (GEGC/CABBI) and Ray Ming (GEGC) are among the 416 people to be awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow this year, in addition to mechanical science and engineering professor Narayana Aluru, and computer science professor William Gropp.
Leakey studies plant responses to climate change as well as the development of crops that will require less water and are more drought tolerant. According to the AAAS, he is recognized in the field of agriculture, food and renewable resources “for distinguished contributions to plant science, particularly for advancing integrative understanding of crop carbon and water relations in the context of global environmental change.” Leakey also is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I.
Ming is an expert on sex chromosome evolution and the reproductive biology of selected tropical crop plants. According to the AAAS, he is recognized in the field of agriculture, food and renewable resources “for distinguished contribution to the field of sex chromosome evolution, particularly using genomic technologies to study early stages of sex chromosomes relevant to crop improvement.” Ming also is an affiliate of the IGB.
Aluru studies problems in micro and nanotechnology, focusing on the development of computational approaches, understanding the physics of coupled mechanical systems at small scales and exploring applications of micro and nanosystems. According to the AAAS, he is recognized in the field of engineering “for outstanding contributions to computational, physical and engineering aspects of nanofluidics and micro/nanoelectromechanical systems including the development of novel multiphysics and multiscale methods.” Aluru also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I.
Gropp uses high-performance computing to address problems that cannot be solved by other techniques. According to the AAAS, he is recognized in the field of information, computing and communication “for distinguished contributions to scalable algorithms and software for high-performance computing.” He is the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of I.
Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society. Fellows are chosen by their peers for outstanding contribution to the field. The new Fellows will be honored at the 2019 AAAS annual meeting in Washington, D.C.