Three UCLA faculty members were named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for a range of work including international nuclear weapons policy and proteins that are beyond microscopically small.

 

The non-profit AAAS, with roughly 120,000 members, is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. The AAAS mission is to advance science and serve society through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education and more.

 

Chancellor Emeritus and professor Albert Carnesale was honored for his dual roles in developing international arms control policy and in academic leadership. Carnesale was an adviser on the U.S. delegation during the 1969 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I) with the Soviet Union, which resulted in the first U.S.-Soviet agreements on nuclear weapons.

 

He is currently chairing a congressionally appointed academic committee on nuclear forensics, the science of determining the origins of rogue nuclear materials. Also at the request of Congress, Carnesale chairs a high-level committee that will provide overall direction, coordination and integration of multiple activities by the National Academies, to examine the sweeping issues associated with global climate change.

 

Professor H. Ronald Kaback, with the Geffen School of Medicine's physiology department, was named a fellow for his lifelong work teasing out the secrets of a single protein, lacY, responsible for transporting sugar across a cell membrane. One of Kaback's successes included completing a 12-year quest to map out the protein's 3-D structure. Understanding lacY increases researchers' understanding of the many related transport proteins throughout the body, with implications for solving many health problems, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

 

Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor James Bowie was honored by AAAS for his role in devising ways to determine protein structure. Proteins' functions are inextricably linked not just to their molecular makeup but to their shapes. But while it is important to know a protein's shape in order to understand it, the structures are notoriously difficult to determine. Bowie's lab has developed new techniques that make protein structures easier to determine.

 

AAAS fellows are nominated by their peers. Among nearly 120,000 members, 486 received the distinction this year and will be honored at the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago on Feb. 14. The nominations also appear in the Dec. 19 issue of the journal Science.