Two HMNTL faculty members elected AAAS fellows

Six professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been elected 2020 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and two of them are HMNTL faculty.

Bioengineering Professor Rohit Bhargava and Materials Science and Engineering Professor Paul Braun; are among the 489 scientists to be awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow this year.

Rohit Bhargava
Bhargava is the Founder Professor in Bioengineering and the director of the Cancer Center at Illinois, with a research home in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and affiliate appointments in several departments across the campus. His lab works to develop new chemical-imaging tools and artificial intelligence technologies that will aid in detecting, diagnosing and understanding cancer. Among his educational innovations are the Cancer Scholars Program and the National Institutes of Health T32-supported Tissue Microenvironment Training Program for graduate students across campus. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and he has received other national awards for his research.

Paul Braun
Braun is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and the director of the Materials Research Laboratory at the U. of I., with appointments in other departments and institutes, including the Beckman Institute. His research group focuses on the synthesis of materials with carefully crafted 3D nano- and mesoscale architectures that have useful optical, electrochemical and thermal properties. For example, his group is developing new materials for high-energy and power-electrochemical energy storage systems such as fast-charging batteries and high-energy microbatteries. Braun is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and is a recipient of numerous faculty and research awards.

Along with Bhargava and Braun, four other Illinois faculty members were awarded the AAAS distinction this year; evolution, ecology and behavior professor Alison Bell; plant biology professor Carl Bernacchi; chemistry professor Prashant Jain; and materials science and engineering professor Nancy Sottos. Read the full university news release here.