AAAS names 10 new UW Fellows

Ten UW professors are among 283 nationwide tapped as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fellows are chosen based on their “efforts toward advancing science or fostering applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished,” according to the association. Among the other schools claiming Fellows, only two University of California campuses—at Riverside (11 Fellows) and Berkeley (10 Fellows) had as many as the UW.

Here is a list of new Fellows from the UW:

Charles Alpers is a professor of pathology and an adjunct professor of medicine. He is both a clinician and a research pathologist, with research interests including kidney disease and disease development in arteries and veins. His work includes identification and localization of growth factors and cytokines in kidney development, kidney disease and human artery disease; development of kidney disease models in animals; work on techniques to better examine tissues, and development of a model for diabetic kidney disease. He has been an associate editor of the American Journal of Pathology since 1994, and is on the editorial boards for three journals related to kidney disease. In 1999, he will be vice president-elect of the Renal Pathology Society, slated to become president in 2001. He joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1986.

Charles Hirschman has been a professor of sociology here since 1987. He earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1972. Hirschman’s research spans two broad areas. One is the study of social and demographic change in Southeast Asia, including work on fertility decline in Southeast Asia, ethnic inequality in Malaysia, and war mortality in Vietnam. He is currently directing a longitudinal survey project in Vietnam that is measuring household responses to the emergence of the market economy. His second area of research is the study of immigration and ethnic inequality in the United States. He is currently analyzing the impact of changing race and ethnic classifications in census and survey data.

Lee Huntsman, provost and vice president for academic affairs, previously served 16 years as director of the Center for Bioengineering. A joint initiative of the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine, the Center for Bioengineering became one of the top ranked bioengineering programs in the country under Huntsman’s leadership. Huntsman joined the UW in 1968, shortly after receiving his doctorate in biomedical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. His research has focused on mechanics of the heart and heart muscle, cardiovascular system assessment and new techniques for measuring cardiac function.

Joel Kingsolver is a professor of zoology known for his study of insects. Research in his laboratory combines field experiments and mathematical modeling to explore the environment, physiology and functional morphology of organisms and their ecological and evolutionary consequences. Current research includes selection and evolution of morphological and physiological plasticity; physiological, ecological and evolutionary responses of insects to climate change; nutritional physiology and evolutionary ecology of feeding and growth in caterpillars; and functional morphology and evolutionary ecology of flight and escape from predators in butterflies. Kingsolver earned a doctorate in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1981 and joined the UW faculty in 1986.

Rachel Klevit is a professor of biochemistry in the School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of chemistry. She is best known for her intricate studies of protein structure and folding and for her investigations of the relationships between function and structure in proteins. Using a variety of techniques, with an emphasis on high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectroscopy, her lab explores the way proteins, or certain regions of proteins, are formed. The laboratory has several ongoing projects; one of them focuses on BRCA1, the breast cancer susceptibility protein, and the structure of its N-terminal region. In collaboration with others, Klevit solved the first three-dimensional structure of a zinc finger domain, a ubiquitous DNA-binding motif, and the first three-dimensional structure of the inactivation gate of a voltage-gated sodium channel, important in many inherited diseases. She came to the UW in 1983 as a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry, and joined the Department of Biochemistry in 1986.

Anna Mastroianni, who joined the UW Law School regular faculty this fall after two years as a part-time lecturer, earned her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds a master’s in public health from the UW. Mastroianni works in a variety of areas in health law, health policy and bioethics (covering issues in human subjects research, responsible conduct of research, genetics, public health, and reproduction). She has written extensively on women and health research and is currently working on a textbook in bioethics.

James Mayer earned a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1982 and joined the UW’s chemistry department in 1984. His research interests include inorganic and organometallic chemistry, and extend into catalysis, coordination chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry and solid-state chemistry. His work focuses on the transition of metal compounds with multiple bonds, such as metal-oxo complexes, and he also is currently investigating the mechanisms of organic oxidation reactions mediated by transition metal complexes.

Stephen Porter, director of the Quaternary Research Center and professor of geological sciences, has studied alpine glaciation in northern, western and southern Alaska; the Cascades; the Andes of Chile and Argentina; the Himalayas; the Alps; the Southern Alps of New Zealand; Siberia and Hawaii. He has focused on topics such as determining the chronology of neoglacial ice advances; rockfall hazards in the Alps; and changes in glacier equilibrium-line altitude as a measure of climate change. He has mapped the volcanic geology of Kohala on the island of Hawaii and carried on collaborative investigations in the Loess Plateau of central China. Porter earned his doctorate from Yale in 1962 and has been at the UW ever since.

Kenneth Thummel is an associate professor of pharmaceutics in the School of Pharmacy. He is an expert in the way the body handles, distributes and eliminates drugs (pharmacokinetics). Thummel is particularly interested in the role of certain enzymes that naturally occur in the liver and intestines. These enzymes are important in determining the way in which drugs act in the body and sometimes block drug metabolism in the intestines or liver. One of the enzymes, CYP2E1, is an important factor in liver injury related to anesthetics or fatty infiltration. Thummel has recently focused much of his research on issues of drug metabolism in liver transplant patients. He earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from the UW in 1987 and then joined the faculty in 1989.

Stephen Warren earned a doctorate in physical chemistry from Harvard in 1973, but at the UW he is a professor of atmospheric sciences and geophysics. Warren studies ice and snow, chiefly the climatic role of snow and clouds. He has observed and developed models for the interaction of radiation with seasonal and permanent ice and snow cover (called the cryosphere) and developed cloud climatology from surface observations. That work is a natural component of courses he teaches, which include Earth’s Climate System, Physical Climatology, Atmospheric Geophysics, Atmospheric Radiation, Atmospheric Remote Sensing, Formation of Snow and Ice Masses, and Climate Modeling of Ice Ages. He has been at the UW since 1982.

Founded in 1848, AAAS represents the world’s largest federation of scientists and has more than 144,000 individual members. The association publishes the weekly, peer-reviewed journal Science and administers EurekAlert!, the online news service featuring the latest discoveries in science, medicine and technology. ¶