Five on faculty honored as AAAS fellows


Burr

Five Cornell faculty members -- Thomas J. Burr, Richard Durrett, Dexter Kozen, Sally McConnell-Ginet and John C. Schimenti -- 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.

The researchers will be recognized Feb. 12 at the annual AAAS meeting, held this year in Chicago.


Durrett

Burr, the Goichman Family Professor of Enology and Viticulture in the Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and director of Cornell's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, is cited for seminal contributions to the understanding of the biology and control of two devastating pathogens of grapevines and for administrative leadership in the agricultural sciences. Burr, who completed his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 1978, leads a program that emphasizes understanding how bacteria communicate with each other and how they interact with plants to cause disease or function as biological controls.


Kozen

Durrett, professor of mathematics, was honored for exceptional contributions to the field of probability theory and its applications, particularly for bridging mathematics and biology. He studies stochastic spatial models that arise from questions in ecology and probability problems that arise from genetics. Durrett received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1976.

Kozen, the Joseph Newton Pew Jr. Professor in Engineering, is cited for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science, including the theory of computability, computational complexity, algorithms and program logic and verification. Kozen, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1977, is especially interested in the complexity of decision problems in logic and algebra, logics and semantics of programming languages and computer security.


McConnell-Ginet

McConnell-Ginet, professor emerita of linguistics, received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1973; she was named an AAAS fellow for her work on model-theoretic semantics and the study of language and society, especially gender and sexuality. McConnell-Ginet works on formal models of natural language meaning, including the relation between syntactic structures and semantic interpretation, and on the interaction of language with the social and cultural milieux in which it is used.


Schimenti

Schimenti, professor of genetics and director of Cornell's Center for Vertebrate Genomics, was recognized for significant contributions to the genetic analysis of mouse development, with a focus on methods for thorough genetic screening and analysis of gametogenesis and meiosis. His lab also uses the mouse model system to investigate the genetics of cancer. He has used genetic technologies to mutagenize the mouse genome and identify novel genes involved in these processes. He received his Ph.D. in developmental biology from the University of Cincinnati in 1985.

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