AUSTIN, TX — Six University of Texas at Austin faculty members have been elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest public scientific association.
The honor honors important contributions in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—including pioneering research and leadership in a specific field, fostering collaboration, and enhancing public understanding of science.
The new Fellows join more than 49 University Fellows who have received lifetime honors. Nationally, AAAS elected 505 new fellows this year.
“I am very proud of our newly elected AAAS colleagues,” said Daniel Jaffe, Vice President for Research. “They join an exclusive group of nationwide scientists and engineers, building on their significant contributions to STEM research. Having so many high-performing scientists at the University of Austin underscores the institution’s impact and enriches the quality of both research and teaching.”
This year’s AAAS Fellows hail from the School of Natural Sciences, the Cockrell School of Engineering and the School of Information.
Scott Aronson He is the Schlumberger Centennial Professor and Chair of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests center around the capabilities and limitations of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory in general. He has received numerous awards throughout his career, the latest being the 2020 Society for Computing Machinery Award for his pioneering contributions to quantum computing.
Valerie Roxanne Bogoca Assistant Professor in the College of Mass Communication. She is active in science communication and public engagement efforts and organizer of the UT Science Communication Interest Group. Her most recent research includes the participation of academic librarians in conferences and non-library organizations, such as AAAS, and the validation of search strategies in a bibliographic database. She has retired from her position as STEM librarian for the health sciences. While in this position, she produced the UT Libraries outreach programs, Research Speed-Dating and Research + Pizza.
Catherine A Calder He is the chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methodology for spatial and relational data. Much of her current work is stimulated and applied to problems that fall under the umbrella of contextual exposure/effects analysis, with applications in the social, environmental, and health sciences.
Diana Marculescu He is Department Chair and holds the Cockrell Family Chair for Engineering Leadership and Chair of Motorola Regents in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She is the founding director of the UT Intelligent Machine Engineering Consortium, an industry-university partnership in machine learning and systems, and leads the Energy-Aware Computing Group, a group dedicated to driving computing efficiency for high-society applications. Effect. Her work includes power and reliability aware computing, device aware machine learning, computing for sustainability and natural science applications.
bingyu rang Professor of Biomedical Engineering and holds the ECH Bantel Professor of Professional Practice. His work uses computational biology and molecular modeling that integrate scientific computing, chemistry, physics, and biology for pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. His work seeks to engineer new molecules, from small organic molecules to proteins and nucleic acids, with structure and function tuned for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes.
Claus or. Woe to you Professor of Integrative Biology and holds the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centenary Professorship in Molecular Evolution. In 2019, Wilk published Data Visualization Basics, which provides a brief introduction to effectively visualizing many different types of data sets. He has published extensively in the fields of computational biology, molecular evolution, protein biochemistry, and virology, and has created several popular computational packages used for data visualization.
New Fellows will be featured in the AAAS News & Notes section of the February issue of AAAS Sciences He will be honored at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., this summer.