Fall 2013 Honor Roll

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named Chad Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, to NAI Fellow status. Election to NAI Fellow status is a professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Mirkin is also a professor of medicine, chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering.

The American Physical Society (APS) Council has named four Northwestern professors as 2014 fellows. Erik Luijten, associate professor of applied mathematics and of materials science and engineering, was honored for the development of algorithms that greatly accelerate the simulation of condensed matter systems and for their application in elucidating the behavior of a broad range of self-assembly phenomena. Adilson Motter, the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, was honored for his contributions to the foundations of chaos and the study of nonlinear dynamics in complex networks, including the discovery of synthetic rescues and pioneering work on network synchronization phenomena, cascading failures and the control of nonlinear network dynamics. Luís A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, was recognized for seminal advances in the characterization and modeling of complex systems, especially the proposal and development of cartographic methods for the representation of large complex networks. Frank Petriello, associate professor of physics and astronomy, was recognized for pioneering new methods in the application of perturbative quantum chromodynamics to high-energy processes, and for computing high-precision, fully exclusive production cross sections for electroweak vector bosons and Higgs bosons at hadron colliders. 

Mathematics professors Francesco Calegari and Paul Goerss were elected as 2014 Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Calegari was recognized for contributions to number theory and to many aspects of the Langlands program. Goerss was honored for contributions to modern homotopy theory through applications of modular forms and algebraic geometry. 

Larry V. Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Education and Social Policy, is the recipient of the 2013-14 Statistician of the Year Award. Hedges was nominated by past recipients for his ongoing commitment to the statistical sciences which have influenced the fields of statistics, psychology, education, social policy and other disciplines. The Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association will present the award in October. Hedges will deliver a talk on the consequences of big data in science, society and the statistical profession after receiving the award.