CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Sarita V. Adve and physics professor Philip W. Phillips have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honor societies in the nation.
They are among 276 new members, including artists, scholars, scientists and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors to be elected to the academy this year.
Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the U. of I. Her primary research interest is at the computer hardware-software interface and includes computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems and applications. She co-developed the memory consistency models for the C++ and Java programming languages and also is known for her contributions to cache coherence, heterogeneous computing and hardware reliability.
She earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1993 and the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1987. She is a fellow of the Association for Computer Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She received the 2018 ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award, which recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing; the 2020 campus award for excellence in graduate student mentoring; and was recognized by the 2020 Computing Research Association’s distinguished service award for co-founding the CARES movement to address harassment and discrimination in computer science conferences.
Phillips is part of the theoretical condensed matter group in physics at the U. of I. He has developed various models of how electrons travel through superconductors containing copper and iron and how electrons interact at temperatures near absolute zero.
He is recognized for his work on the random dimer model, a 1D model that conducts electricity in the presence of disorder, violating the localization theorem of Anderson’s and for developing the concept of Mottness, which explains the breakdown of the particle concept in strongly interacting systems such as the copper-oxide high-temperature superconducting materials.
Phillips earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1982. He worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at Illinois in 1993. He is a fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good.
“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in boardrooms and courtrooms,” said academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the academy’s work to advance the public good.”