Five UM Scientists Named AAAS Fellows in 2008

By Gwyneth Dickey

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Five University of Maryland, College Park faculty are among the 486 new fellows recently named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Election as a fellow of AAAS, the world's largest general federation of scientists and the publisher of the journal Science, is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers, and, according to AAAS, was awarded to the new members "for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications."

The new AAAS fellows for 2008 will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on Saturday, Feb. 14, at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago.

The university's five 2008 AAAS fellows bring the campus total of current fellows to 45. The new University of Maryland, College Park fellows are:

Avis H. Cohen is the founder and former director of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program at University of Maryland. She studies spinal cord regeneration and organized motor behavior in a primitive vertebrate, the lamprey. She has previously worked on a robot controller for legged robots aimed at becoming a spinal cord prosthetic device for spinal cord injury patients. Cohen also works with the Telluride Workshop in Neuromorphic Engineering. She is being recognized for distinguished contributions in spinal regeneration and the development of the fields of computational neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering, especially as applied to motor control.

Nathan Fox, Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Child Development Laboratory at the University of Maryland, studies infant cognitive, social and emotional development. His longitudinal Temperament Over Time Study (T.O.T.S.) investigates the internal and external factors associated with the development of social behavior from infancy through early childhood. He is also conducting the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, studying the effects of a foster care intervention in institutionalized children in Bucharest Romania. Dr. Fox is being recognized for elucidating the basis of early temperament and social behavior.

Nicholas J. Hadley, professor of physics and the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education of the University of Maryland Physics Department, is being recognized for his leadership role in the discovery of the top quark and his contributions to searches for phenomena beyond the standard model of particle physics. He has served as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Division of Particle and Fields of the American Physical Society and as a member of the Cornell Physics Advisory Committee.

K.J. Ray Liu is a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and Research of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland. He is also the Director of Communications and Signal Processing Laboratories and leads the Maryland Signals and Information Group (SIG). His research contributions encompass broad aspects of wireless communications and networking; multimedia communications and signal processing; information forensics and security; biomedical imaging and bioinformatics; and signal processing algorithms and architectures. Dr. Liu is being recognized for his distinguished contributions to signal processing for wireless communications, multimedia, information forensics and security.

V.S. Subrahmanian, professor of Computer Science and director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is being recognized for contributions in computer science and multidisciplinary computing, for techniques to implement multiple data sources, software programs, automatically build group behavioral models and forecast group behaviors. He helped launch OASYS, a start-up company developed at UMIACS. Based on a series of complex algorithms, the OASYS technology is capable of tracking the media on the Internet in many languages, measuring worldwide opinion on a variety of subjects. OASYS won Computerworld Magazines 2006 Horizon Award, which goes to the most innovative pre-commercial technology.

The AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society, founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science serving 10 million individuals. The tradition of AAAS fellows, who are chosen by their peers, began in 1874. 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; and more.