UA News

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has included Carol Barnes and Nancy Moran in its new class of Fellows.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has added two distinguished women faculty members from The University of Arizona to its membership of Fellows.

Carol A. Barnes and Nancy A. Moran are among 471 new fellows who will be honored at the Fellows Forum on Feb. 16 during the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed on AAAS members by their peers. The announcement was made Oct. 26.

Barnes, a Regents’ Professor in the UA psychology department and director of the McKnight Brain Institute at the Arizona Research Laboratories, is an internationally respected researcher on cognition and aging. A past president (2004-05) of the 38,000-member Society for Neuroscience, Barnes studies how the brain changes during the aging process and the consequences of those changes on information processing and memory in the elderly. Her research provides a framework for understanding the basic mechanisms of normal aging in the brain, which in turn makes it possible to assess the effects of pathological changes, like Alzheimer’s disease.

Nancy A. Moran is a Regents’ Professor in the UA ecology and evolutionary biology department. Moran has developed innovative methods for studying the evolution of biological complexity, especially the symbiotic relationships between animals and their partner bacteria. Reproduction in aphids, for example, depends on genes and enzymatic pathways in bacteria living in specialized cells inside the aphids. Another insect, the sharpshooter, a bane in wine-country vineyards, uses two kinds of bacteria to help it digest sap from grape plants.

AAAS, begun in 1848, is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal Science. AAAS includes 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, and 10 million individual members. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million. The non-profit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education and more.