AAAS honors five UW-Madison members

Five University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty and staff members are among the 471 scientists, engineers, educators and communicators who have been selected as fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The awards are announced in the Oct. 26 issue of Science.

Fellows are elected annually from within AAAS membership ranks in recognition of significant contributions to advancing scientific research, teaching and communicating science to the public. The new fellows will be honored at a special forum during the 2008 AAAS annual meeting in Boston on Feb. 16.  The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

Named from UW–Madison are:

• Jin-Yi Cai, professor of computer sciences, for exceptional contributions to computational complexity theory.
• Elizabeth A. Craig, professor of biochemistry, for outstanding contributions to the field of molecular genetics and seminal work on molecular chaperones, highly conserved proteins that facilitate the folding and transportation of other proteins.
• Michael R. Culbertson, professor of genetics and molecular biology, for advances in yeast genetics, including the discovery of the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay pathway, a post-transcriptional mechanism that regulates yeast gene expression.
• Terry Devitt, director of research communications for University Communications, for development and leadership of the Web magazine “The Why Files,” which publishes popular accounts of the science behind the news.
• John M. Norman, professor of soil science, for advancing the interdisciplinary understanding of interactions among plants, animals, soil and atmosphere through mathematical modeling and cooperative collaborations with colleagues and students.