Since 1874, more than 110 BU scholars have been named AAAS Fellows. The latest members of this distinguished group are electrical and computer engineer Siddharth Ramachandran (from left), physicist Bradley Lee Roberts, and biologist Daniel Segrè. Photos by Jacob Chang-Rascle (COM’22) and Cydney Scott

Awards

Three BU Researchers Elected AAAS Fellows

World’s largest scientific society gives lifetime honor to BU biologist, engineer, and physicist

Inventor Thomas Edison was admitted to the club in 1878, sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B Du Bois in 1905, and computer scientist Grace Hopper in 1963. Being named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow puts scholars in distinguished company—and a trio of Boston University researchers have just been selected for the honor.

Electrical and computer engineer Siddharth Ramachandran, physicist Bradley Lee Roberts, and biologist Daniel Segrè have been named AAAS Fellows for extraordinary contributions to their respective fields; they’ll be recognized at a special event later this year.

“This year’s class embodies scientific excellence, fosters trust in science throughout the communities they serve, and leads the next generation of scientists while advancing scientific achievements,” says Sudip S. Parikh, AAAS CEO and executive publisher of the Science family of journals.

The world’s largest scientific society, AAAS has elected fellows since 1874; this year marks the program’s 150th anniversary. During that time, more than 110 BU scholars have been selected for the award.

Siddharth Ramachandran: Tornado-Shaped Light Beams

Ramachandran, a College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering, studies the use of structured light, or light beams, that travel in twisting paths rather than in straight lines. In a 2013 Science paper, he and his colleagues demonstrated that these corkscrew laser beams can be wielded to double or even quadruple the capacity of fiber-optic cables—the kind that carry data across the internet.

Last year, his team leapfrogged that mark: in a second groundbreaking Science paper, they showed it’s possible to use the tornado-shaped light beams to transmit 50 or even 100 times more data than today’s networks could handle. And, in the bargain, the researchers made an interesting scientific discovery: photons traveling in these spiral paths show the same orbital motion as binary stars in outer space.

While the internet capacity implications of Ramachandran’s work have attracted the most attention, the techniques his lab is pioneering have the potential to advance other industries, as well. The techniques might be applied to more efficient quantum computing, high-powered lasers, and neuroimaging.

“Siddharth is a leading scholar in photonics and optics,” says Elise Morgan, ENG dean ad interim and Maysarah K. Sukkar Professor of Engineering Design and Innovation. “He has been at the forefront of his field for decades, and has a long track record of innovative advances in the science and engineering of light.”

Ramachandran, who’s also affiliated with BU’s physics department and Photonics Center, considers it a signal honor to be named an AAAS Fellow. “As the umbrella body for all the sciences in the US,” he says, “not only does AAAS publish Science, one of the most prestigious journals covering all the sciences, but they also have a very positive role as strong advocates for robust science policy.”

Bradley Lee Roberts: Building Blocks of the Universe

Roberts, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of physics, is an expert on subatomic particles—in particular, the muon, a fundamental particle similar to an electron and considered one of the building blocks of the universe. For many years, he helped lead experiments at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, testing the limits of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which scientists have long used to explain the forces and matter shaping the world around us. In 2021, he was part of an international team that helped demonstrate that the muon—influenced by mysterious, yet-to-be-explained forces—behaved in ways that the Standard Model didn’t predict.

“Over the last 50 years, our understanding of the subatomic world has become really amazing,” Roberts told The Brink at the time. “We’ve managed since the 1970s to put a lot of things together, theoretically, that explain magnetic interactions and forces that govern our physical world—but there are a number of questions we still don’t understand.” Their findings, he said, revealed “that there must be something else beyond what we currently know.”

Roberts, who joined BU in 1977 after stints at the UK’s Rutherford High Energy Laboratory and MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science, was also the winner of the American Physical Society’s 2023 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.

“As Lee’s longtime colleague, I am delighted that AAAS has honored him by electing him as a fellow,” says physicist David Campbell, BU’s director of graduate studies and former provost. He calls the fellowship “appropriate recognition for Lee’s lifetime of leadership in high-precision experiments in nuclear and particle physics and, in particular, his work on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.”

Like Ramachandran, Roberts cites AAAS’ support, outreach, and advocacy when reflecting on being named a fellow.

“I am deeply honored to have been elected a fellow of AAAS, which serves a number of important roles in the scientific community,” he says. “It is also active in promoting the role of science on many fronts, playing a significant role in informing the public on scientific matters of interest.”

Daniel Segrè: Using Microbes to Improve Health, Fight Climate Change

Your body is full of little colonies of microbes—some working in your favor, helping you digest food and fight off disease; some working against you, contributing to obesity or diabetes. The communities they form are known as microbiomes, and they exist just about everywhere on Earth—in plants, animals, rivers, the atmosphere.

Segrè, a CAS and Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences professor of biology, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, and physics was honored by AAAS for his contributions to studying and decoding these microbial ecosystems—and for testing ways to shape them to improve human and environmental health.

“A lot of our work is aimed at understanding how these communities function,” says Segrè, who founded the cross-disciplinary BU Microbiome Initiative, “and whether we can predict them using mathematical models and computer simulations, which would help us modify them or design new ones from scratch.”

By researching microbial metabolism—the chemical reactions that help these microscopic organisms spark into life and generate energy—Segrè hopes to map the “specific combinations of bacteria or metabolic functions in the human microbiome that are good for us and understand how to steer microbiomes toward stable health-promoting states, for example by tweaking available nutrients.” He says the same approach could also be used to benefit the environment, perhaps by helping microbes associated with plants better lock away CO2. 

“It is wonderful to see Daniel Segrè’s research in complex biological networks receive the recognition he deserves,” says Pamela Templer, a CAS professor and chair of biology. The CAS community is “thrilled that AAAS is recognizing two of our outstanding faculty members for their transformative research and exemplary contributions to their scientific fields,” Stan Sclaroff, dean of Arts & Sciences, says of Segrè and Roberts.

Segrè, who’s also affiliated with BU’s bioinformatics program and Biological Design Center, hopes his AAAS award can help raise awareness of the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration—and of not being afraid to step across traditional academic boundaries. “I strongly believe in the value of basic science, and in the opportunities that arise when scientists with completely different backgrounds get together and ask each other what seem naive questions about other fields, or come up with creative questions driven by curiosity,” he says. “I hope people will see some of this in our work.”