Five University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States. Nancy M. Amato, Rashid Bashir, Alison Bell, Charles Gammie and Paul Selvin are among the 250 inductees for 2024.
Founded in 1780, the academy recognizes scientists, artists, scholars and leaders who have distinguished themselves in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.
Two of the inductees – Rashid Bashir and Paul Selvin – are members of the Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL).
Left to right: Rashid Bashir and Paul Selvin
Rashid Bashir is the Grainger distinguished professor of bioengineering and dean of The Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois. Bashir’s research focuses on integrating engineering and technology with biology and medicine, from the molecular scale to tissues and systems. His group has developed various lab-on-a-chip and point-of-care diagnostic devices to detect disease, infection and sepsis from bodily fluids, as well as miniature biological robots for applications in medicine and engineering. Bashir is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society and others. He was on the founding team of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the U. of I. and is currently on the leadership advisory committee of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago.
Physics professor Paul Selvin is a pioneer of fluorescence microscopy. He developed several methods and applications including LRET, a technique to illuminate the properties of DNA and mutant nervous systems; FRET, a single-molecule imaging technique now widely used in biophysics to study the structure and dynamics of molecules and cellular processes; and FIONA, a super-resolution technique that his group is applying to study molecular motors and the channels that transmit signals between neurons. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
The new members will be inducted in a ceremony on Sept. 21 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The complete list of members elected to the academy is available on its website.
You can learn about the other inductees from Illinois and see the original story from the News Bureau here.