Rice professors are new AAAS fellows

Baraniuk, Bayazitoglu, Tour honored for scientific contributions

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Three high-profile Rice University professors have been named to this year’s class of fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

	RICHARD BARANIUK		YILDIZ BAYAZITOGLU		JAMES TOUR

Richard Baraniuk, Yildiz Bayazitoglu and James Tour are among 531 members of the association to be named fellows this year. The honor is given to those whose contributions are considered to be socially or scientifically distinguished.

The new fellows are invited to the presentation of official certificates and gold-and-blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pins at the annual AAAS meeting in San Diego Feb. 20.

Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), was selected for his contributions to signal processing, particularly in multiresolution analysis, network monitoring and compressive sensing, and also for founding Connexions, Rice’s open-education resource. Baraniuk was named a World Technology Award winner earlier this year for Connexions and has gotten notice for his work on Rice’s single-pixel camera.

“Rice has provided an ideal environment for building my research program, thanks to the strong support for signal processing in particular and engineering in general,” said Baraniuk, sharing the credit. “The Rice ECE department does a better job mentoring both its junior and senior faculty than any department I know in the country. When you have models like Sidney Burrus (former dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and a pioneer in digital signal processing) to follow and such a positive, can-do environment, it’s easy to make big progress in research.”

Bayazitoglu, the Harry S. Cameron Professor in Mechanical Engineering, was singled out for her contributions to the field of radiative heat transfer and for her role as an educator, mentor and role model to young engineers. She is editor-in-chief for the Americas of the International Journal of Thermal Sciences and was the first woman in the half-century history of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to receive the organization’s Heat Transfer Memorial Award.

”I am delighted to receive this honor for my cited contributions, which I very much enjoyed working on,” Bayazitoglu said. ”We live with the choices we make in our scientific life and hope we were lucky enough to land on the right ones that provide us not only success but also happiness.” Bayazitoglu said support from her husband, the research community and Michael Carroll, a mechanical engineer and professor who preceded Burrus as engineering dean, have been essential to her success.

Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science, was honored for his contributions to the field of organic chemistry and nanotechnology, particularly for soft materials science, including conjugated polymers, fullerenes, nanotubes, graphene and nanomachines. Last week, Tour was named one of the top 10 chemists in the world by the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education for his copious papers and number of citations over the last decade.

“I am thankful for the honor of having the research recognized in this way,” Tour said. “It is always a bit of an odd feeling, too, knowing that the students in the lab are the ones who generate the specific results, yet I am the one being recognized. I trust they also will be rewarded in life for their hard work, which has made this possible.”

The AAAS has been naming fellows since 1874. The new fellows join 18 other current AAAS members on the Rice faculty who have been so honored.