14 Illinois faculty members elected AAAS Fellows

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Fourteen University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been elected 2021 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The new fellows are chemistry professor Martin Burke; crop sciences professor Brian Diers; physics professor Aida El-Khadra; physics professor Eduardo Fradkin; cell and developmental biology professor Brian Freeman; evolution, ecology, and behavior professor Mark Hauber; plant biology professor Katy Heath; bioengineering professor Joseph Irudayaraj; anthropology professor Lyle Konigsberg; anthropology professor Ripan Malhi; computer science professor David Padua; civil and environmental engineering and geography and geographic information science professor Murugesu Sivapalan; geography and geographic information science professor Shaowen Wang; and computer science professor Tandy Warnow.

Burke, the May and Ving Lee Professor for Chemical Innovation, is pioneering the field of “molecular prosthetics,” small molecules that mimic the functions of deficient proteins, and a Lego-like platform for automating molecular synthesis. He led the SHIELD Team at Illinois. He also is a professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.

Diers, the Charles Adlai Ewing Chair of Soybean Genetics and Breeding, focuses on the development of new soybean varieties and germ plasm to help meet the growing global demand for protein and vegetable oil. He is a fellow of the Crop Science Society of America and the American Society of Agronomy.

El-Khadra works on topics in theoretical high energy physics. She has made many significant contributions to the development of lattice quantum chromodynamics, where her focus is on precision calculations that are needed to interpret measurements in high energy experiments. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fermilab Distinguished Scholar.

Fradkin is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Physics. He has made long-standing contributions in condensed matter physics and quantum field theory, including the theory of the phase diagrams of gauge theories, the field theory of the fractional quantum Hall effects, and the theory of intertwined orders in high temperature superconductors. He directs the U. of I. Institute for Condensed Matter Theory. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Freeman’s research team focuses on three central nuclear processes – transcription, chromatin remodeling and genome reorganization – to better understand how these systems maintain, or fail to maintain, homeostasis. His work is relevant to aging-related diseases, metabolic disorders and cancer.

Hauber, the Harley Jones Van Cleave Professor of Host-Parasite Interactions, is a neuroethologist, behavioral ecologist and comparative psychologist whose work focuses on the evolution of recognition systems in birds. He is a professor in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the Illinois State Natural History Survey at the U. of I. He is a fellow of the American Ornithological Society and the Animal Behavior Society.

Heath studies the evolution of mutualistic relationships in biology, with a special focus on the beneficial exchanges between plants and microorganisms. Her expertise is in the interactions between legumes and their symbiotic, nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. Heath is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and of microbiology at the U. of I.

Irudayaraj, the Founder Professor in Bioengineering, works to develop biosensors and nanotechnology that aid human health and biosecurity. This work extends to smart therapeutics, point-of-care diagnostic aids and super-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy tools to aid in understanding, treating and preventing disease. He is a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society.

Konigsberg specializes in developing and improving methods, standards and tools for assessing age, sex and other characteristics from present-day and prehistoric human skeletal and dental remains for application in forensic and archaeological contexts.

Malhi’s research involves partnering with North American Indigenous communities on studies that analyze genomic variation to infer their evolutionary histories, including the effects of European colonization. He has campus affiliations in the U. of I. School of Integrative Biology, American Indian Studies and in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

Padua, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering, has devoted much of his career to the study of languages, tools and compilers for parallel computing. This includes work on autotuning, high-level notations for parallel programming, compiler evaluation and the efficient implementation of scripting languages.

Sivapalan’s research focuses on understanding variability in rainfall-runoff processes across scales, places and time by exploring the interactions between climate, soil, vegetation and topography. A key focus is on increasing the reliability of predictions to address critical water-management challenges. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Wang’s research interests include geographic information science and systems, advanced cyber infrastructure and cyberGIS, complex environmental and geospatial problems, computational and data sciences, high-performance and distributed computing, and spatial analysis and modeling. He is the department head in geography and geographic information science, with affiliations in computer science, urban and regional planning and the School of Information Sciences at the U. of I.

Warnow is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering. Her main research focus is on the development of algorithms for statistical estimation problems in computational biology and historical linguistics. She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the International Society for Computational Biology. She was awarded a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and a David & Lucile Packard Fellowship.