Janet Smith named AAAS Fellow
October 25, 2007 - Janet L. Smith, research professor at the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan, has been awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow. Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.
Smith, who is also Margaret J. Hunter Collegiate Professor of Life Sciences, Department of Biological Chemistry, U-M Medical School, is one of U-M’s 10 AAAS Fellows for 2008. Her election is for her distinguished contributions to the field of structural biology, both for the development of methodology and for leadership in the establishment of facilities for crystallography. Smith was one of the pioneers of an important tool in structural biology called multiwavelength anomalous diffraction (MAD), an improved way of imaging large and complex molecules.
"Not only has Janet led the development on new beamlines at Argonne, she serves as the director of our own Center for Structural Biology open to all U-M researchers and is an outstanding scientist who stretches boundaries,” said Alan Salitel, LSI director. “Her collaborations across disciplines have produced outstanding discoveries in top ranked journals.”
This year 471 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be honored on Saturday, 16 February during the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.
Other AAAS Fellows from U-M include: David R. Engelke, Gary D. Glick, Robert T. Kennedy, John L. King, Pinaki Mazumder, Laurie K. McCauley, Franco Nori, Peter J. Polverini, and Ronald W. Woodard.
Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the Steering Groups of the Association's 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members or by the AAAS Chief Executive Officer.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science. AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million.
