Four SAS Faculty Named Fellows of AAAS

Four faculty members in the School of Arts and Sciences have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for their distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

Shelley Berger, Daniel S. Och University Professor and Professor of Biology, was elected for seminal contributions to the clarification of the role of chromatin structure and the biochemistry of histones in eukaryotic gene regulation. Her research is critical to the burgeoning field of epigenetics, the study of genetic changes caused by factors other than genes. She also holds appointments in in the department of cell and developmental biology and department of genetics at Penn’s medical school. In 2010, Berger received the Ellison Medical Foundation’s Senior Scholar in Aging Award, and earlier this year she was elected to the Institute of Medicine, one of the nation's highest honors in biomedicine.

Professor of Chemistry Feng Gai was elected for seminal contributions to the field of protein folding—the process by which a protein takes its functional state—particularly for pioneering new spectroscopic methods to probe protein conformational dynamics in real time. His research on the subject was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie last year. Gai is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Professor of Chemistry Marisa Kozlowski was elected for insightful contributions to catalysis, particularly for the application of a broad range of computational tools to catalyst development and for biomimetic oxidative coupling catalysis, in designing new methods and catalysts for use in organic synthesis. This year Kozlowski also received the 2012 American Chemical Society Philadelphia Section Award and has previously received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Andrea Liu, Hepburn Professor of Physics and Professor of Chemistry, was elected for distinguished contributions in theoretical physics, particularly for demonstrating that slow relaxation in many different systems can be viewed within a common framework called “jamming”—a process comparable to the formation of glass into a solid. She has also recently collaborated with researchers from Penn’s veterinary school in studying the behavior of T-cells. The recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, Dr. Liu is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide. The new Fellows will be honored on February 16 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.