image: This is Janet Braam. view more
Credit: Rice University
HOUSTON - (Nov. 20, 2017) - Rice University professors Janet Braam and José Onuchic have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
Braam and Onuchic are among 396 AAAS members elected by their peers to this year's class of fellows. Fewer than 1 percent of the association's members are elected each year. Fellows are selected for their distinguished efforts to advance science or scientific applications.
"Professors Braam and Onuchic are outstanding scholars with a deep commitment to undergraduate and graduate students," said Rice Provost Marie Lynn Miranda. "They represent the very best of Rice -- advancing the knowledge frontier, serving as excellent and exciting educators and providing tremendous leadership on our campus."
Braam, the Wiess Professor of BioSciences and chair of Rice's Department of BioSciences, was honored for "insightful and innovative contributions elucidating plant responses to diverse environmental stimuli."
Braam takes a molecular approach to the study of how plants adapt to their environments, especially hostile ones that force them to evolve. One recent study showed how vegetables use their internal clocks to anticipate attack from insects even after harvest, leading to strategies that could optimize the nutritional benefits of crops. In another, Braam and her colleagues traced the uptake and accumulation of nanoparticles from water to plant roots to leaves and finally to the caterpillars that eat them.
Onuchic is the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Chair of Physics and a professor of physics and astronomy, of chemistry and of biosciences and co-director of Rice's National Science Foundation-supported Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP). He was honored for "outstanding contributions to biological physics, especially for his seminal contributions to the understanding of protein folding through energy landscape concepts."
Onuchic, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, works at the intersection of biology and physics, primarily through computational analysis, to reveal how atomic-scale processes relate to the behavior of cells and their communities with a particular focus on cancer. Recently, Onuchic and his CTBP colleagues applied their sophisticated models to predict how chromosomes fold based on epigenetic markers associated with a cell's DNA.
Braam and Onuchic will be honored Feb. 17 at the Fellows Forum at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.
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This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2017/11/20/rice-university-scientists-named-aaas-fellows/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Related materials:
Braam Lab: http://www.bioc.rice.edu/~braam/index.html
Onuchic bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Onuchic
Images for download:
http://news.rice.edu/files/2017/11/1204_AAAS-WEB-1-2lqok4q.jpg
Janet Braam.
http://news.rice.edu/files/2013/09/Jose_Onuchic-web.jpg
José Onuchic.
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,879 undergraduates and 2,861 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.