Professors from the School of Arts & Sciences, Perelman School of Medicine, and School of Engineering and Applied Science are among 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators being recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
(Clockwise from bottom left) M. Susan Lindee, Marlyse Baptista, Jinbo Chen, George Cotsarelis, and Christopher B. Murray were elected 2024 AAAS Fellows.
AAAS, a society with a mission to “advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all,” has named a class of Fellows since 1874. This year’s honorees will be celebrated at a forum in Washington, D.C., in June.
Penn’s new AAAS Fellows are:
Marlyse Baptista is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, director of the Language Contact and Cognition Lab, and MindCORE faculty affiliate in the School of Arts & Sciences. She specializes in language contact, the morphosyntax of Pidgin and Creole languages, and theories of Creole genesis. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes involved in the emergence and development of Creoles. She has developed a theoretical model of language convergence in multilingual settings and has conducted interdisciplinary collaborations investigating Creoles, using empirical, theoretical, experimental, and computational methods. She collaborated with geneticists to unveil the founding populations of Cabo Verde and identify the source languages that contributed to Cabo Verdean Creole. She has published in Language, Cognition, the Annual Review of Anthropology, Lingua, Frontiers in Language Sciences, and Current Biology. She has served as president of the Linguistic Society of America and the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and she has been named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and of the Michigan Society of Fellows. Baptista is being recognized “for distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics, particularly for theoretical and cognitive modeling of Creole languages, language contact, and language emergence.”
Jinbo Chen is a professor of biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine. Her research focuses on statistical methods for risk prediction, innovative analysis of electronic health record (EHR) data, and the development of efficient sampling designs under resource constraints. Chen’s recent work has addressed practically important analytical challenges in risk modeling using EHR data, including the development of robust methods to account for EHR phenotyping inaccuracies; assessing and improving the fairness of statistical models and machine learning/AI algorithms; monitoring the temporal performance of machine learning/AI algorithms; enhancing risk modeling through data integration; and inferring individual and group variable importance. Her methods have been applied to advanced research in various scientific fields, including breast cancer risk prediction, health services research, and cardiovascular health. Chen is being recognized for “distinguished contributions to breast cancer risk prediction models, gene-environment interactions, and integrating prediction models in electronic health records, and for highly impactful leadership in research and services to the profession of statistics.”
George Cotsarelis is the Milton Bixler Hartzell Professor of Dermatology at the Perelman School of Medicine and has served as the chair for the Department of Dermatology since 2010. He has been a member of AAAS since 1990. His research focuses on epithelial stem cells, which has impacted two distinct areas of medicine: ophthalmology and dermatology. Cotsarelis discovered epithelial stem cells of the cornea, leading to the routine use of limbal cells for corneal transplantation. He also launched the hair follicle stem cell field, and his work resulted in understanding the pathogenesis of alopecias. He is being recognized for “the identification of epithelial stem cells in skin hair follicles and in the cornea, how they drive tissue homeostasis and regeneration in the adult, and their therapeutic applications.”
M. Susan Lindee is the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science in the School of Arts & Sciences. Her work explores the history of genetics, radiation and nuclear risk, and militarized science and technology in the 20th century. Her books include “Rational Fog: Science and Technology in the Modern War,” “Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima,” and “The DNA Mystique.” She has brought students to Hiroshima and Tokyo as part of her course Global Radiation History: Living in the Atomic Age 1945-Present—a Penn Global Seminar—and participated in Penn’s Galápagos Education and Research Alliance as an instructor in the Islands. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the History of Science Society’s Schuman Prize, and she has served as a visiting professor at universities in China, Singapore, and Japan. She is now working on the history of the complex roles of the Army Corps of Engineers in the management of the Atchafalaya River, a Louisiana swamp where she has family origins. Lindee is being recognized “for historical scholarship that grapples with the thorny challenges of modern science—genetics, radiation, and the technologies of war—and invites ethical action.”
Christopher B. Murray is the Richard Perry University Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering and a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor with appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research focuses on innovative methods to tackle critical challenges in energy sustainability, environmental protection, information processing, and human health. By bridging disciplines, he develops novel chemical techniques that create tiny building blocks measuring just 1 to 100 nanometers—about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a sheet of paper. At this nanoscale, materials exhibit unique quantum mechanical properties, leading to breakthroughs in electrical, optical, magnetic, and catalytic capabilities. Murray holds 26 current patents, with four additional patents pending, related to these nanoscale inventions. He is being recognized “for distinguished service to the field of nanochemistry, particularly for the synthesis of nanocrystals with precisely controlled dimensions and nanocrystal self-assembly, enabling the development of nanocrystal thin films and devices.”
Penn engineers and collaborators have developed a transparent, micro-engineered device that houses a living, vascularized model of human lung cancer—a “tumor on a chip”—and show that the diabetes drug vildagliptin helps more CAR T cells break through the tumor’s defenses and attack it effectively.
Tumor-on-a-chip offers insight into cancer-fighting cells in immunotherapy
Penn engineers and collaborators have built a living tumor on a chip to expose how cancers block immune attacks, and how one existing drug could make immunotherapy like CAR T more effective against solid tumors.
Professor of city and regional planning Erick Guerra recently published a book exploring the economic and societal impacts of American highways. He explains some of the pitfalls associated with an ever-expansive highway system, arguing that spending more on highways might not be the solution to the country’s transportation issues.
Penn urban planner Erick Guerra’s new book, “Overbuilt,” argues that additional spending on building more highways might not be the solution to the country’s transportation issues. In a Q&A, Guerra shares his insights.
Xin Sun prepares samples collected from the Eastern Tropical North Pacific aboard a research vessel. By adding stable isotope tracers to these vials, Sun and her team can track how different microbial groups convert nitrogen compounds into nitrous oxide, revealing how subtle shifts in oxygen and organic matter change the ocean’s chemistry.
Can tiny ocean organisms offer the key to better climate modeling?
In the shadowy layers of the Pacific, microbes decide how much nitrous oxide—a potent greenhouse gas—rises skyward. New research from Penn’s Xin Sun offers an improved understanding of microbial ecology and geochemistry—key to forecasting global emissions in response to natural and man-made climate change.
Two X-ray plates from Arthur Goodspeed, believed to have created the world’s first X-ray image, were donated by his family to Penn’s University Archives.
