LAS faculty members elected AAAS Fellows

Two professors from the College of LAS have been elected 2018 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Plant biology professors Andrew Leakey and Ray Ming are among the 416 people to be awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow this year. Two other professors at Illinois, including mechanical science and engineering professor Narayana Aluru and computer science professor William Gropp, were also elected this year.

Leakey studies plant responses to climate change as well as the development of crops that will require less water and are more drought tolerant. According to the AAAS, he is recognized in the field of agriculture, food and renewable resources “for distinguished contributions to plant science, particularly for advancing integrative understanding of crop carbon and water relations in the context of global environmental change.” Leakey also is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U of I.

Ming is an expert on sex chromosome evolution and the reproductive biology of selected tropical crop plants. According to the AAAS, he is recognized in the field of agriculture, food and renewable resources “for distinguished contribution to the field of sex chromosome evolution, particularly using genomic technologies to study early stages of sex chromosomes relevant to crop improvement.” Ming also is an affiliate of the IGB.

Aluru studies problems in micro and nanotechnology, and Gropp uses high-performance computing to address problems that cannot be solved by other techniques. He is director of the National Center for Supercomputing applications.