URBANA, Ill., Nov. 27, 2018 — NCSA Director and Chief Scientist William Gropp and NCSA Faculty Affiliate Narayana Aluru have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This year, 416 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, 16 February from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. and will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on 29 November 2018.

As part of the Information, Computing and Communication section, Dr. William Gropp, NCSA Director and Chief Scientist and the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois, was elected as a AAAS Fellow for his distinguished contributions to scalable algorithms and software for high performance computing.

Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Gropp has explored parallel computing, software for scientific computing, numerical methods for partial differential equations, and the development of efficient and scalable parallel algorithms for the solution of linear and nonlinear equations. He has played a major role in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and was one of the designers of the PETSc parallel numerical library. Gropp is also recognized as a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and an elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

“The AAAS is the premier society representing all of science and it is a leader in communicating science to the public. I’m proud to be a member and I am honored by this recognition,” said Gropp.

Dr. Narayana Aluru, NCSA Affiliate from the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, was selected in the Engineering section for his outstanding contributions to computational, physical, and engineering aspects of nanofluidics and micro/nanoelectromechanical systems including the development of novel multiphysics and multiscale methods.

Other 2018 Fellows from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign include Dr. Andrew D.B. Leakey of the Department of Crop Sciences in the Agriculture, Food and Renewable Resources section for distinguished contributions to plant science, particularly for advancing integrative understanding of crop carbon and water relations in the context of global environmental change; and Dr. Ray Ming of the School of Integrative Biology, also in the 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.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee’s institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer. Fellows must have been continuous members of AAAS for four years by the end of the calendar year in which they are elected. AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor comes with an expectation that recipients maintain the highest standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity.

Each steering group reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list.

The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About AAAS

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!

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Source: NCSA