Michael Kassner (AME,CE-MS), Shrikanth Narayanan (CS, EE-S), and Viktor Prasanna (EE-S, CS) are now Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"The election of Mike, Shri and Viktor as AAAS Fellows is a great testament to their caliber and accomplishments and reflects highly on the whole faculty of the Viterbi School." said Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. "I cannot be more pleased with their recognition, which is surely only the latest, with many more to come."
Kassner served as chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering since his arrival at the Viterbi School in 2003, and also has an appointment in the Mork Family Department of Chemcial Engineering and Materials Science. Beginning this summer, he will take fellowship to serve as the Director of Research for the Office of Naval Research in Washington D.C.. His recent research projects include work on creep, fracture, fatigue and thermodynamics, supported by three National Science Foundation grants, Basic Energy Sciences of the Department of Energy, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was honored by the AAAS for “distinguished research in the mechanical behavior of materials, and for leadership in universities, national laboratories, and research funding agencies to advance research in materials science.”
Michael Kassner
Narayanan, who is Andrew J. Viterbi professor in the school of the same name, has appointments in both its Department of Computer Science and its Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering - Systems, as well as the College Departments of Psychology and Linguistics. He directs the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, and has carried on research signals and systems modeling with an interdisciplinary emphasis on speech, audio, language, multimodal and biomedical problems and applications with direct societal relevance, including work on child-friendly computer interfaces, computer detection of human emotion in speech and facial expression, and real time speech-to-speech translation systems. His AAAS citation notes “outstanding contributions to human communication science and technologies and their applications to engineering systems development.”
Shrikanth Narayanan
Viktor Prasanna
Prasanna, who holds the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering, is professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering Computer Engineering Division, specializing in advanced computing systems. He is co-director of the Center for Research and Education in Advanced Software Technologies (CAST), funded by Infosys Technologies, and is a major contributor to the Center for Interactive Smart Oilfield Technologies The AAAS award salutes his “distinguished contributions to the field of parallel and distributed computing, in particular, reconfigurable computing, and for building a vibrant international community in this area.”
The AAAS also named as Fellows Peter Jones and Michael Stallcup of the Keck School of Medicine of USC. The five USC faculty members will be among 531 scientists and engineers honored February 20, 2010 at the Fellows Forum of the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego.
The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Members are considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering group of their respective sections, by three Fellows, or by the association's chief executive officer. The AAAS Council votes on the final list. AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the prestigious journal Science. The society was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science serving 10 million individuals.
