Faculty members named AAAS fellows

Seven Washington University in St. Louis faculty members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.

The newest fellows from WUSTL are: Michael Brent, PhD; Raj Jain, PhD; and Arye Nehorai, PhD; and School of Medicine faculty members Alison Goate, DPhil; Jeanne M. Nerbonne, PhD; D.C. Rao, PhD; and Barry Sleckman, MD, PhD. Members are given the rank of fellow, the highest honor awarded by AAAS, by their peers in recognition of scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

The WUSTL faculty members are among 702 new fellows acknowledged in the Nov. 30 issue of Science magazine. The 2012 AAAS fellows also will be honored at a Feb. 16 ceremony at the organization’s annual meeting in Boston.

Michael Brent

The Henry Edwin Sever Professor of Engineering, Brent was lauded by his AAAS colleagues for development and application of innovative computational methods of genomic analysis, including methods for annotating exon-intron structures and for mapping and modeling regulatory networks. Brent’s work on computational methods for sequence analysis led to significant improvements in genome annotation technology, enhancing the value of genome sequences for the scientific community.

Brent’s lab, located in the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, is now developing methods for mapping, modeling and engineering gene regulation networks. Brent and his students construct quantitative models of biological control networks that predict how modifications to the networks will affect network behavior. They are particularly interested in the dynamic properties of regulatory networks, such as response times and sensitivity to noise.

Members of the Brent lab have applied their modeling approaches to understanding how the availability of excess sugar leads to changes in the transcription rates of genes and how these transcriptional changes affect sugar metabolism. These studies focus on regulatory networks whose main features are conserved from yeast to humans. Brent also collaborates with members of the School of Medicine faculty on mapping regulatory networks involved in a variety of processes, such as how excess dietary sugar can lead to diabetes and how a disease-causing fungus builds a protective capsule around itself when it infects a human.

After completing a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a PhD in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brent served as assistant and associate professor of cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins University, where his research focused on computational modeling of how children learn language.

He joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in 1999 and, in the early 2000s, changed his research focus to computational biology. In 2006, his lab moved to the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology on the Medical Campus.

Raj Jain

A professor of computer science and engineering, Jain was praised as a professor and scientist for distinguished contributions to the field of computer networking impacting the areas of traffic management, performance modeling and wireless networking.

Jain is the author or editor of 10 books, including Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, which won the 1991 Best-Advanced How-to Book, Systems Award from the Computer Press Association and High Performance TCP/IP: Concepts, Issues, and Solutions, published by Prentice Hall in 2003.

He is a co-editor of Quality of Service Architectures for Wireless Networks: Performance Metrics and Management, published in 2010.

Previously, Jain was the chief technology officer and one of the co-founders of Nayna Networks Inc. – a next-generation telecommunications systems company in San Jose, Calif. He was a senior consulting engineer at Digital Equipment Corp. in Littleton, Mass., and then a professor of computer and information sciences at Ohio State University.

Jain has 14 patents and has written 15 book chapters, more than 55 journal and magazine articles and more than 95 conference papers. His papers have been widely referenced, and he is known for his research on congestion control and avoidance, traffic modeling, performance and error analysis. Google Scholar lists more than 15,000 citations of his publications.

He is a co-inventor of the DECbit scheme, which has been implemented in various forms in DECnet, OSI, Frame Relay and ATM Networks. His team has developed several switch algorithms for explicit rate-based congestion avoidance in ATM networks.

A distinguishing factor of his research is its relevance to the industry. As a faculty member, Jain actively participates in industry forums like WiMAX Forum, IEEE Standards Group, ATM Forum and Internet Engineering Task Force. He has made more than 200 contributions that ensured that his research was implemented, not just published. He was awarded the 1999 SiliconIndia Leadership Awards for Excellence and Promise in Business and Technology.

Jain earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from APS University in Rewa, India, a master’s degree in engineering (computer science and controls) from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a PhD in applied math and computer science from Harvard University.

The Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor and chair of the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering (ESE) was recognized for distinguished contributions to the field of statistical signal processing with broad applications and for academic leadership in electrical and systems engineering.

Nehorai is also a professor in the Division of Biology and Biomedical Studies and director of the Center for Sensor Signal and Information Processing at WUSTL. Previously, he was a faculty member at Yale University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Under his leadership as ESE chair, undergraduate enrollment has nearly tripled in the last four years.

From 2000-01, Nehorai served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Signal. From 2003-05 he was the vice president (publications), chair of the publications board, and a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). He was the founding editor of the special columns on leadership reflections in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, which he edited from 2003-06.

Nehorai received the 2006 IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award and the 2010 IEEE SPS Meritorious Service Award. He was elected distinguished lecturer of the IEEE SPS from 2004-05. He was a co-recipient of the IEEE SPS 1989 Senior Award for Best Paper, a co-author of the 2003 Young Author Best Paper Award and a co-recipient of the 2004 Signal Processing Magazine Paper Award.

In 2001, he was named university scholar of the University of Illinois. Nehorai was the principal investigator of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative project titled “Adaptive Waveform Diversity for Full Spectral Dominance” from 2005 to 2010. He has been a fellow of the IEEE since 1994 and of the Royal Statistical Society since 1996.

He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Technion in Israel and a PhD from Stanford University

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