Faculty elected fellows of American Association for Advancement of Science
December 21, 2006
Three Penn State faculty have been elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society. The honor is given to members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished."
They are David Geiser, associate professor and director of the Fusarium Research Center in the Department of Plant Pathology, College of Agricultural Sciences; and Moses Chan, the Evan Pugh professor of physics, and Thomas Mallouk, the DuPont professor of materials chemistry and physics, both in the Eberly College of Science.
In addition, Jorge Pullin, adjunct professor of physics at Penn State and the Horace Hearne professor of physics at Louisiana State University, was also named an AAAS Fellow.
The award will be presented to 449 individuals during the February AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Geiser, associate professor and director of the Fusarium Research Center in the Department of Plant Pathology, studies the molecular evolutionary genetics of fungi, mostly in the realm of molecular phylogenetics and systematics at the species level. These tools help identify and better understand the fungal culprits in plant and animal diseases and toxicoses.
As director of the Fusarium Research Center at Penn State, he also curates the world's largest collection of cultures of Fusarium, one of the most important genera of toxigenic and pathogenic fungi. The center has nearly 20,000 samples and provides isolates to certified researchers, and also provide identification and other services.
Chan's research is aimed at answering or raising fundamental questions about matter in its various phases or states such as liquid, solid and gas. He is particularly interested in phase transitions -- the conditions under which a material changes from one phase to another -- in quantum fluids, in reduced dimensions and in the presence of disorder. The principles he and his research group have helped to establish have proven to be useful in understanding a wide variety of problems in condensed-matter systems undergoing phase transitions.
Mallouk is a solid-state chemist who is perhaps best known for applying inorganic materials to a broad range of problems in chemistry. He is one of the pioneers in research on self-assembly of inorganic molecules. Currently, his group is using surface chemistry to tackle problems in molecular electronics, environmental remediation and catalytic energy conversion.
Pullin's research focuses on both classical and quantum-mechanical aspects of gravitational physics. He has developed equations to compute the gravitational waveforms and radiated energies generated by the collision of two black holes. These calculations are currently of great interest in astrophysics because the new Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is expected to detect several black-hole collisions per year, and the calculations provide a theoretical basis for interpretation of the data.
Contact
Vicki Fong
vfong@psu.edu
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814-865-9481