Four current MIT faculty members have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the journal Science will announce on Friday, Nov. 27.
The new fellows are part of a group of 347 AAAS members elected by their peers in recognition of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. This year’s fellows will be honored at a ceremony on Feb. 13, 2016, at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington.
Karl K. Berggren, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a researcher at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, was recognized for distinguished contributions to methods of nanofabrication, especially applied to superconductive quantum circuits, photodetectors, high-speed superconductive electronics, and energy systems.
Edmund Bertschinger, a professor of physics and MIT’s Institute Community and Equity Officer, was recognized for highly visible, national-scale promotion of diversity in the fields of physics and astronomy, and for intellectual contributions to the field of gravitation and cosmology.
Gerald R. Fink, a professor of genetics within the MIT Department of Biology and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute, was recognized for his distinguished contributions to genetics and to science more broadly through his involvement as a leader of major scientific organizations, including AAAS.
Victor W. Zue, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a principal researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was recognized for distinguished contributions to the field of computational spoken language and language understanding, and for contributions to the strengthening of academic computer science research; as well as for distinguished contributions to acoustic phonetics, phonology, and speech recognition, and for leadership in the development of human language technologies.
Additionally, Sekazi Kauze Mtingwa, who retired from MIT in 2012 and who served as a senior lecturer in the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education, was recognized for distinguished contributions to accelerator physics and nuclear energy policy, and for major efforts to promote physics research at U.S. minority-serving institutions and in Africa.
