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THE American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected 12 chemical engineers as Fellows.

The 12 will be honoured at ceremony on 18 February 2012 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, along with 527 other new Fellows, who have been recognised for their contribution to the field of science and technology.

Princeton University and Northwestern University both had two of their chemical engineers elected; Princeton’s Pablo Debenedetti for his work into thermodynamics, particularly his computational and theoretical models, and his colleague William Russell for his work studying colloids and contribution to education. From Northwestern, Wesley Burghardt was elected for his groundbreaking optical techniques to study polymer flow during processing, and Randall Snurr for his work on nanoporous metal-organic frameworks in energy storage and separations.

Barry Carter, head of chemical, materials and biomolecular engineering at the University of Connecticut was chosen for writing several important textbooks and editing the Journal of Materials Science. Antonios Mikos, a chemical engineering professor and director of both the JW Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering at Rice University was elected for his work in biomaterials.

MIT’s Dane Wittrup heads his own research group for protein engineering technology and drug discovery, and was elected for his work in this area. The Velegol laboratory at Penn State University focuses on colloidal assembly, and its founder, Darrell Velegol was recognised for this research. Michael Tsapatsis, who leads a research group at the University of Minnesota was chosen for advancing understanding of nanoporous materials and the development of molecular sieve thin film processing technology.

Benny Freeman at the University of Texas at Austin was awarded a Fellowship for his research into polymer engineering and membrane science. Yogi Goswami of the University of South Florida was recognised for his research and teaching of solar energy technologies. Michael Sefton at the University of Toronto was recognised for his work advancing the field of tissue engineering.