Members of Calit2 Advisory Board Inducted as Fellows of AAAS

San Diego, CA, February 21, 2008 -- Two members of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) Advisory Board are among the scholars newly inducted as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Dennis Lettenmaier University of Washington

Dennis P. Lettenmaier and Joseph M. Sussman attended the induction ceremony Feb. 16 during the Fellows Forum at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Each received a certificate and a gold-and-blue rosette pin -- the colors representing science (gold) and engineering (blue). Lettenmaier and Sussman teach respectively at the University of Washington and MIT.

"We are proud of their achievements and congratulate them on this well-deserved honor," said Calit2 Director Larry Smarr. "At Calit2 we rely heavily on the input and wisdom of our Advisory Board, and professors Sussman and Lettenmaier have been very helpful to us in our Intelligent Transportation and Environmental Hydrology programs, respectively."

According to the AAAS, new Fellows are elected by their peers based on their work "advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished."

Joseph Sussman MIT

Joseph Sussman is the JR East Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Engineering Systems Division at MIT. Sussman's research focuses on large transportation networks and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). He was elected to the AAAS for his "contributions to understanding large, complex engineering systems with emphasis on transportation, freight, and traveler systems, and for pioneering work in transportation systems education." He has been on the MIT faculty for 40 years, focusing recently on developing a new methodology for regional strategic transportation planning and applying it to cases in the U.S. and abroad, including Mexico, Thailand and Portugal.

Dennis Lettenmaier is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington (UW), with a specialty in surface water hydrology and climate. AAAS cited him for "distinguished contributions to the field of surface hydrology, particularly for development of land surface-atmosphere schemes used in climate modeling." Lettenmaier received his Ph.D. from UW in 1975. In addition to his service at UW, he spent a year as visiting scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, VA (1985-86) and was the Program Manager of NASA's Land Surface Hydrology Program at NASA headquarters in 1997-98.

New Fellows are elected to one of 25 sections. Sussman was elected to the engineering section, Lettenmaier to the section on atmospheric and hydrospheric sciences.

Fully 53 of the 471 new Fellows inducted into the AAAS this year come from the University of California. The newcomers include eight from UC Irvine, and four from UC San Diego. New AAAS Fellows who are actively involved with Calit2 on their respective campuses are UCSD's Steven Briggs (elected to the section on biological sciences), as well as UCI's Jean-Luc Gaudiot (information, computing and communication) and Suzanne Sandmeyer (biological sciences).

Founded in 1848, the AAAS is one of the world's largest general scientific societies, and publishes the prestigious journal Science , which -- with an estimated readership of one million -- has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. Members of the society are nominated to the rank of Fellow by the steering groups of the association's 24 sections, by any three Fellows, or by the AAAS chief executive officer.

In addition to MIT's Sussman and UW's Lettenmaier, members of the Calit2 Advisory Board include: co-chairs Forest Baskett (a venture partner with New Enterprise Associates) and Phil Smith (former executive director of the National Research Council); Donald Beall of Rockwell International; John Seely Brown, former director at Xerox PARC; Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Vinton Cerf; Robert Conn of Enterprise Partners Venture Capital; UCLA professor Deborah Estrin; Versant Ventures' William Link; Anne Peterson, former senior vice president at the Kellogg Foundation; CONNECT president Duane Roth; and Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of QUALCOMM and professor emeritus in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.

Related Links

AAAS Fellows
Dennis Lettenmaier Website
Joseph Sussman Website

Media Contacts

Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu