MIT Press authors honored as AAAS Fellows

The list of 2022 AAAS fellows includes names such as Ainissa Ramirez, author of The Alchemy of Us, and Georg Striedter, author of Model Systems in Biology

The American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting kicks off this week, and we are thrilled that several MIT Press authors are honored this year as AAAS Fellows. The distinction highlights AAAS members “whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications in service to society have distinguished them among their peers and colleagues,” and we have to agree.

Congratulations to our authors on this great achievement.


Atul Butte, Atmospheric & Hydrospheric Sciences

Coauthor of Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics 

Functional genomics—the deconstruction of the genome to determine the biological function of genes and gene interactions—is one of the most fruitful new areas of biology. The growing use of DNA microarrays allows researchers to assess the expression of tens of thousands of genes at a time. This book provides a systematic introduction to the use of DNA microarrays as an investigative tool for functional genomics.

Lise Getoor, Information, Computing & Communication

Coeditor of Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning 

Handling inherent uncertainty and exploiting compositional structure are fundamental to understanding and designing large-scale systems. Statistical relational learning builds on ideas from probability theory and statistics to address uncertainty while incorporating tools from logic, databases and programming languages to represent structure. In Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning, leading researchers in this emerging area of machine learning describe current formalisms, models, and algorithms that enable effective and robust reasoning about richly structured systems and data.

Alec Marantz, Linguistics & Language Science

Author of On the Nature of Grammatical Relations

This book presents a theory of grammatical relations among sentential constituents which is a development of Chomsky’s Government-Binding Theory. The cross-linguistic predictive power of the theory is unusually strong and it is supported in the examination of a wide range of languages.

D. Kimbrough Oller, Linguistics & Language Science

Coeditor of Evolution of Communicative Flexibility 

The evolutionary roots of human communication are difficult to trace, but recent comparative research suggests that the first key step in that evolutionary history may have been the establishment of basic communicative flexibility—the ability to vocalize freely combined with the capability to coordinate vocalization with communicative intent. The contributors to this volume investigate how some species broke free of the constraints of “fixed signals,” actions that were evolved to communicate but lack the flexibility of language.

Ainissa Ramirez
Author Ainissa Ramirez.

Ainissa G. Ramirez, Education

Author of The Alchemy of Us, winner of the 2021 AAAS/Subaru SBF Prize in the Young Adult Science Book Category

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.

Georg F. Striedter, Neuroscience

Author of Model Systems in Biology

In Model Systems in Biology, comparative neurobiologist Georg Striedter examines how biomedical researchers have used animal species and in vitro cellular systems to understand and develop treatments for human diseases ranging from cancer and polio to Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Although there have been some major successes, much of this “translational” research on model systems has failed to generalize to humans. Striedter explores the history of such research, focusing on the models used and considering the question of model selection from a variety of perspectives—the philosophical, the historical, and that of practicing biologists.


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