CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Three University of Illinois professors have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the longest-standing honorary societies in the nation. Psychology professors J. Kathryn Bock and Gary S. Dell, and physics professor Taekjip Ha will join other new members in an induction ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bock, an emeritus faculty member in psychology and in the Beckman Institute at Illinois, explores how cognition influences language structure and whether the language a person speaks influences his or her perception of events and objects.
Bock received a Fulbright Research Fellowship (1991) and a Sloan Fellowship (1982); she was a visiting research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (intermittently between 1983 and 2012); she is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 3); a fellow of the American Psychological Society; and a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
Dell, also a professor in the Beckman Institute, studies how people produce and understand sentences. He developed the first computational model of language production and used it to simulate properties of speech errors, or "slips of the tongue." He later used related models to understand patterns of pathological speech production resulting from brain damage. His recent work focuses on how linguistic abilities change with experience and how such changes can be captured in neural networks.
Dell is a recipient of the American Psychological Association Early Career Award and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society.
Ha is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a professor in the Beckman Institute and the Cellular Decision Making in Cancer theme leader in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. He also is co-director of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for the Physics of Living Cells at the U. of I.
Professor Ha uses physical concepts and experimental techniques to study fundamental questions in molecular biology. He has developed new techniques that have enhanced the study of individual molecular interactions. His most recent work uses single-molecule measurements to understand protein-DNA interactions and enzyme dynamics.
Ha is a recipient of the Ho-Am Prize (2011), the Bárány Award of the Biophysical Society (2007), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2003), a Cottrell Scholar Award (Research Corporation, 2003), a Young Fluorescence Investigator Award of the Biophysical Society (2002) and a Searle Scholar Award (2001). He was named a University Scholar at the University of Illinois in 2009, and he is a fellow of the American Physical Society.