AAAS honors five UW-Madison engineers and physicists as fellows

Five members of the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the society announced today.

UW–Madison’s honorees are:

R. Byron Bird, professor emeritus of chemical and biological engineering, “for a distinguished career advancing the science, teaching and international communication of chemical engineering, particularly the areas of transport phenomena, polymer dynamics and rheology.”  

Mark A. Eriksson, professor of physics, “for innovative and important contributions to the understanding and development of nanodevices for spintronics and quantum information processing applications.” 

Raymond Fonck, professor of engineering physics, “for advances in fusion plasma spectroscopy diagnostics and leadership of the U.S. fusion program into the burning plasma era.”

 

 Ian M. Robertson, dean of the UW–Madison College of Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, “for distinguished contributions in materials science which have advanced the understanding of metallic materials in extreme environments, and for leadership in academic and research administration.”

Gary Shiu, professor of physics, “for pioneering contributions to string phenomenology and cosmology, for leadership in connecting fundamental theory to experiment, and for promoting basic science in the U.S. and Asia.” 

Since 1874, members of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, have elected fellows based on their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science. The fellows will be formally inducted in February at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.