Three Engineering faculty members named Fellow by AAAS

Three members of the faculty in the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University have been awarded the distinction of Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Dr. Justin Schwartz is the head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor; Dr. Nancy Allbritton is Professor and chair of the Joint NC State-UNC Department of Biomedical Engineering; and Dr. Mohammed Zikry is Zan Prevost Smith Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

AAAS elevates members to the rank of Fellow for their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.

Schwartz’s interests include processing-structure-property relationships and failure mechanisms in superconducting materials and systems, multiferroic/optical-magneto-electric thin films and devices, topological insulators and other functional oxides. He focuses on the scientific challenges in transitioning a new material into a technologically functional material.

Schwartz earned a B.S. in nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1985 and a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. Prior to joining NC State, Schwartz was Jack E. Crow Professor of Engineering at Florida State University.

Allbritton’s research lies in the areas of signaling in single cells, microfabricated systems for cellular analysis and the development of new technologies to address biomedical problems. She is the scientific founder of two companies, Cell Biosciences and Intellego Corporation.

She earned a B.S. in physics from Louisiana State University in 1979, an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1985 and a Ph.D. in medical physics/medical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.

Zikry is interested in computational modeling for materials/structures from the nano to the micro scales, failure models for heterogeneous systems, experimental mechanics, dynamic behavior of structures and materials and behavior of active materials.

He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from University of Kansas, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from University of California, San Diego.

Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and includes 261 affiliated societies and academies of science serving 10 million people. AAAS is the publisher of the journal Science, among other publications, and began awarding the distinction of Fellow in 1874.