WEST LAFAYETTE— Four Purdue University faculty members have been elected as 2024 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the highest national distinctions within the scientific community. The select fellowship recognizes distinguished achievements among scientists whose work has advanced science or its applications.
This year, AAAS elected Trevor Anderson of the College of Science, Songlin Fei and Tesfaye Mengiste, both in the College of Agriculture, and Ronnie Wilbur of the College of Health and Human Sciences.
“These esteemed faculty members are exemplars for Purdue’s standard of excellence,” said Karen Plaut, executive vice president for research. They set a high bar for themselves, their peers, and their students. Purdue joins with AAAS in recognizing these four faculty members, whose achievements also contribute to Purdue’s reputation for excellence in research and teaching.”
Trevor Anderson
Trevor Anderson, a retired associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, is a biochemist and biochemistry education researcher who served in the previous chemical education and biochemistry divisions.
The AAAS attributed his fellowship election to his “distinguished work in biochemistry education research, especially focused on molecular visualization and systemic education reform in chemistry and biology education internationally.”
During two decades of science education research, Anderson graduated numerous doctoral and master’s students across a wide range of education disciplines, including biochemistry, chemistry, biology, molecular biology, microbiology, physics, and mathematics. He was well known for his workshops on scholarship, his design of curriculum-change models, and his authorship of the Bridging-the-Gap series in the journal Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, aimed at encouraging scholarship in teaching and learning through the application of educational research to teaching practice.
Anderson’s Visualization in Biochemistry Education (VIBE) research group fostered international diversity through various collaborations with colleagues in Australia, Sweden, South Africa, Portugal, and Brazil. He was also a senior research associate at the School of Life Science of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Songlin Fei
Cited by the AAAS for his “distinguished contributions in bringing 21st-century advances in digitization to forest science,” Songlin Fei has gained distinction for using data science and digital technologies to explain complex natural systems and foster the sustainability of natural resources.
Fei, professor and Dean’s Chair for Remote Sensing in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and director of the Center for Digital Forestry, is a quantitative ecologist who specializes in forest ecology, invasion ecology, and geospatial analytics.
Fei’s work has shown the impacts of climate change on forest dynamics and biodiversity-ecosystem function. In a 2017 Science Advances paper, he provided the first empirical evidence of the divergent responses of deciduous and evergreen trees in response to climate change. It was highlighted by the journal Nature and was the focus of stories by hundreds of national and international media. Fei is also leading the integrated digital forestry initiative, which aims to revolutionize forestry from labor-intensive, manual methods to an effective, precise, digital system by testing and adopting existing digital tools and by developing new tools, algorithms, and platforms for precision forest management and public health improvement and mitigation.
Tesfaye Mengiste
Tesfaye Mengiste, professor and head of the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology in the College of Agriculture, works to crack the molecular code of mechanisms intrinsic to plant disease resistance. His goal is to help sustain the world’s food supply by breeding plants that have resistance to disease in their genetic makeup. In electing Mengiste for a fellowship, AAAS cited him for “distinguished contributions to the field of plant immunity against fungal pathogens, particularly against necrotrophic pathogens.”
Mengiste led the Purdue research team that made the highly significant discovery of a single gene in sorghum named ARG1 (Anthracnose Resistance Gene1), which confers broad protection from the fungal diseases anthracnose, rust, and target spot. He also studies genetic regulators of plant resistance and their functions in the plant Arabidopsis and tomato. Through genetic, molecular and biochemical approaches, he is determining how selected components regulate plant immune responses to fungal resistance and is examining how plants activate immune gene expression. In parallel, he is working to translate some of the findings into genetic improvement of crops.
Ronnie Wilbur
Ronnie Wilbur, professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences in the College of Health and Human Sciences, specializes in language and deafness and the structure of American Sign Language (ASL) and is an authority on how the prosody-syntax-pragmatics interface affects communication.
The AAAS cites Wilbur’s “distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics, particularly the syntax of American Sign Language.”
Wilbur has investigated the literacy problems of school-age deaf children and studied sign-language acquisition. She has also investigated the interaction of ASL sentence structure with event structure and discourse/pragmatic functions, as well as non-manual markers such as blinks, brow raises, and head nods, to determine how they contribute to the syntax and semantics of sign languages.
In her work with Avinash Kak, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, she is studying the use of robot-vision techniques to perform automatic sign recognition. She is also leading a project to develop ASL-based software for the education of deaf children in mathematics.
