Today, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals, announced its newest class of AAAS Fellows, including Kellogg Faculty Fellow Nitesh Chawla, as well as four other faculty from the University of Notre Dame.
“To be elected by one’s peers as a AAAS Fellow is a tremendous honor and a mark of disciplinary excellence and innovation,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History. “We are proud to celebrate the achievements of these extraordinary colleagues whose scientific contributions help advance Notre Dame as a leading global Catholic research university and a force for good in the world.”
Chawla, the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society is recognized for distinguished contributions to artificial intelligence and data science, specifically in machine learning from imbalanced data, machine learning on graphs, and data science for societal impact. Chawla is also a fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Other Notre Dame faculty elected to the 2023 class of AAAS Fellows include Elizabeth A. Archie (Biological Sciences), Peter C. Burns (Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences), Patricia J. Culligan (Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences), and Nathan G. Swenson (Biological Sciences).
Election as a fellow of AAAS is a lifetime honor, with an expectation that recipients maintain commonly held standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity.
New fellows join noted fellows such as Alondra Nelson, the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and former deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Mae Jemison, the first Black woman to go to space; Steven Chu, 1997 Nobel laureate in physics who served as the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy; W.E.B. Du Bois, considered the founding father of American sociology; Ellen Ochoa, veteran astronaut and the Johnson Space Center’s first Hispanic and second female director in its history; Grace Hopper, pioneer in computer software development and programming language; and Vint Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the internet and received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
AAAS first launched its lifetime recognition in 1874, about 25 years after the association was founded, and included Rev. Joseph Celestine Basile Carrier, C.S.C., the first director of the science program at the University of Notre Dame in 1865, when the College of Science was established.
This article is adapted from a larger one originally posted at news.nd.edu.