Contact: Allison Matthews
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Three Mississippi State faculty members are being honored this week as new Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Mark F. Horstemeyer of mechanical and computational engineering, James C. Newman Jr. of aerospace engineering and Mark A. Novotny of physics and astronomy are receiving the high honor awarded by their peers in recognition of scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.
Based in Washington, D.C., the AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society. The organization publishes the prestigious journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine and Science Signaling.
The three university professors will join with other honorees Saturday [Feb. 16] to receive official certificates and accompanying gold-and-blue rosette pins. The colors represent the science and engineering fields, respectively.
The AAAS Fellows Forum is a major event of the organization's annual meeting, which is being held this year in Boston, Mass.
Horstemeyer chairs the computation solid mechanics program and serves as chief technical officer at MSU's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems. He additionally serves as an adjunct professor in the agricultural and biological engineering department. Since joining the Bagley College of Engineering faculty in 2002, Horstemeyer has been named a Giles Distinguished Professor, the highest academic rank on campus, and been honored with the Ralph E. Powe Research Award.
Newman is both a Giles Distinguished Professor and holder of the Bagley College's Richard H. Johnson Chair of Aerospace Engineering. Principal investigator of research grants totaling more than $3.6 million, he is a specialist in fatigue and fracture mechanics of materials and aircraft structures. He led the development of a fracture standard test method for thin-sheet materials that was adopted in 2006 by the American Society for Testing and Materials.
Novotny has headed the physics and astronomy department since 2001. From 2002-05, he also directed the High Performance Computing Collaboratory Center for Computational Sciences. Before coming to MSU, he was a scholar and scientist at Florida State University's Supercomputer Computations Research Institute. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Novotny also recently was named a Dynasty Foundation Visiting Scientist. Last year, he was among 40 foreign physicists, mathematicians and biologists receiving full travel grants to speak at academic institutions in Russia.
Founded in 1848, the AAAS includes 261 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals around the world. Open to all, the non-profit organization works to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education and other area.
With an estimated total readership of one million, Science currently has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world.
For more on the AAAS and its publications, visit, respectively, www.aaas.org, www.sciencemag.org, http://stm.sciencemag.org and www.sciencesignaling.org.