Three LAS professors elected AAAS Fellows
Three professors in the College of LAS have been elected 2023 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They are among the 502 scientists, engineers and innovators recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements by the world’s largest general scientific society.
The new fellows are evolution, ecology and behavior professor Rebecca Fuller, chemistry professor Christy Landes, and communication professor Marshall Scott Poole.
Fuller’s research explores the evolution of fishes to understand how natural and sexual selection vary over time and space, how genetics drive variation within populations, how visual dynamics influence behavior and selection, and how natural selection and genomic rearrangements contribute to speciation. She is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, and she is the recipient of multiple awards for her research, teaching and mentoring. The AAAS selected her “for distinguished contributions to the field of evolutionary biology, particularly for understanding the behavioral, sensory and genetic basis of mate-choice-driven processes of speciation.”
Landes is the Jerry A. Walker Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Illinois. She is an experimental physical chemist who studies the structure-function relationships in biological processes to inspire innovations in materials design. She is a recipient of the 2024 Kazuhiko Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics from the Biophysical Society “for her exciting developments of single-molecule measurement techniques and their application to chemical and biological systems such as polymers and ion channels.” The AAAS selected her “for the development of next-generation tools and models to image and understand dynamics governing separations at soft interfaces at the single analyte limit.”
Poole is the David L. Swanson Professor Emeritus of Communication at the U. of I. His research interests include group and organizational communication, information and communication technologies, collaboration, organizational change and innovation, and theory construction. One of Scott’s current research projects is the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium Project, a multi-university collaboration which investigates communication and behavior in massive multiplayer online games. AAAS selected him “for distinguished contributions to the science of group and organizational communication, especially studies of how organizational structure and diversity affect innovation and productivity.”
They are among seven on campus who were selected. Others include computer science professor Sarita Adve; civil and environmental engineering professor Praveen Kumar; natural resources and environmental sciences professor Cory Suski; and crop sciences and NRES professor Martin Williams, an ecologist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.
“Every year, the AAAS announcement of new fellows at the U of I reminds us of our faculty members’ profound contributions to science and society,” said Illinois Chancellor Robert J. Jones. “This new crop of fellows has already advanced our understanding of agriculture, chemistry, engineering, technology, communication and the environment, while also demonstrating a fierce commitment to excellence in teaching and mentoring our students.”
