Five Illinois faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Five University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States. Nancy M. Amato, Rashid Bashir, Alison Bell, Charles Gammie and Paul Selvin are among the 250 inductees for 2024. 

Founded in 1780, the academy recognizes scientists, artists, scholars and leaders who have distinguished themselves in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

Nancy M. Amato, Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and department head of computer science, works at the intersection of robotics, parallel and distributed computing, computational geometry and biology. Her research group has developed novel algorithms and new realms of application from robotic task and motion planning to computer-aided design, virtual and augmented reality, protein folding and computing with biological neurons. She is passionate about broadening participation in the field of computing. Amato is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Rashid Bashir is the Grainger distinguished professor of bioengineering and dean of The Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois. Bashir’s research focuses on integrating engineering and technology with biology and medicine, from the molecular scale to tissues and systems. His group has developed various lab-on-a-chip and point-of-care diagnostic devices to detect disease, infection and sepsis from bodily fluids, as well as miniature biological robots for applications in medicine and engineering. Bashir is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society and others. He was on the founding team of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the U. of I. and is currently on the leadership advisory committee of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago. 

Professor of evolution, ecology and behavior Alison Bell studies the evolution of behavior in the three-spined stickleback fish. She is a pioneer in the study of animal personality, using genomics and other tools to understand the causes and consequences of individual behavior differences. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and the American Society of Naturalists. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. 

Charles Gammie, a professor of physics and astronomy, is a leading theoretical and computational astrophysicist. His work has expanded our understanding of black holes, hot plasmas and the formation of stars and planets. He is distinguished in the field for his command of both the theory of general relativity and mathematics. Gammie led the Theory Working Group of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which captured the first image of a black hole. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Physics professor Paul Selvin is a pioneer of fluorescence microscopy. He developed several methods and applications including LRET, a technique to illuminate the properties of DNA and mutant nervous systems; FRET, a single-molecule imaging technique now widely used in biophysics to study the structure and dynamics of molecules and cellular processes; and FIONA, a super-resolution technique that his group is applying to study molecular motors and the channels that transmit signals between neurons. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.  

The new members will be inducted in a ceremony on Sept. 21 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The complete list of members elected to the academy is available on its website.