April 28, 2005

Five At UCSD Named Fellows of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

By Paul Mueller

Five faculty members at the University of California, San Diego have been named fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the academy has announced. The five are among 196 new fellows and 17 new foreign honorary members in the academy’s 225th class.

The new fellows from UCSD are Jack Keil Wolf, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering; Ajit P. Varki, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine; Linda Preiss Rothschild and M. Salah Baouendi, professors of mathematics; and Michael L. Norman, professor of physics.

They join 76 current AAAS fellows on the UCSD faculty.

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields,” said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. “Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.”

Fellows and members are nominated and elected by current members, comprising scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs and business. The academy will welcome this year’s fellows and honorary members at its annual induction ceremony on October 8 in Cambridge, Mass.

The five new UCSD fellows represent a diverse array of disciplines and achievements:

• Jack Wolf is the Stephen O. Rice Professor of Magnetics and was the first chaired professor in UCSD’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research. He joined the UCSD faculty in 1984. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the IEEE, Wolf received the IEEE's Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communication Award in 1998. He was the recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society's Claude E. Shannon Award in 2001 and the Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2004.
  
• Ajit Varki joined the UCSD faculty in 1982. He is currently Professor of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Co-Director of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center, and Associate Dean for Physician-Scientist Training in the UCSD School of Medicine. He also serves as coordinator for the multidisciplinary UCSD Project for Explaining the Origin of Humans. Varki is a recipient of a MERIT award from the NIH and an American Cancer Society Faculty Research Award. He has served as president of the Society for Glycobiology, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He is also an elected member of the Association of American Physicians.
  
• Linda Preiss Rothschild has been a professor of mathematics at UCSD since 1983. Her research areas include mathematical analysis and complex geometry. She is the co-editor-in-chief since 1994 of Mathematical Research Letters. She received her doctorate from MIT, was a co-winner of the Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellow from 1976 to 1980.
  
• M. Salah Baouendi has been a professor of mathematics at UCSD since 1988. He has been the editor of Mathematical Research Letters since 1994 and served as editor of the American Journal of Mathematics from 1988 to 1994. He has published widely in several areas of mathematics, including partial differential equations and complex analysis. He received his doctorate from the University of Paris and, in 2003, was a co-winner of the Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society.
  
• Michael Norman has been a professor of physics and an astrophysicist at UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences since 2000. One of the world's leading computational astrophysicists, he performs much of his research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where he has been a senior research fellow since 2000. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Davis and in 1997 received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize. In 1999, he was awarded the IEEE Society’s Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the AAAS has elected as fellows and honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Media Contact: Paul K. Mueller, (858) 534-8564