Susan Davidson and Duncan Watts are among the ten Penn scholars that have been named to the 2021 class of American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows. The Penn contingent joins 554 other scientists, engineers, and innovators being recognized by the organization this year for their “scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.”
Professor Emerita and GRASP Lab founder Ruzena Bajcsy was also elected in thus year’s class.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest scientific society and publisher of the Sciencefamily of journals. AAAS Fellows are nominated and elected by current AAAS members in a tradition that stretches back to 1874.
Susan Davidson is the Weiss Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Computer and Information Science. She is the co-director of the School’s Data Science Program and the founder of Advancing Women in Engineering. Davidson’s research interests include data management for data science, database and web-based systems, provenance, crowdsourcing, and data citation. Davidson recently received the VLDB Women in Database Research Award as well as the 2021 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Duncan Watts is a computational social scientist interested in social and organizational networks, collective dynamics of human systems, web-based experiments, and analysis of large-scale digital data, including the production, consumption, and absorption of news. He is the Stevens University Professor and 23rd Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor. In addition to his appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication, he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Department of Operations, Information, and Decisions in the Wharton School, where he is the inaugural Rowan Fellow.
Ruzena Bajcsy, established the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab in 1978 as a member of the Department Computer and Information Science. As director of the GRASP lab, she worked on robotics research, including computer vision, tactile perception, and in general the problem of system identification, and fostered interdisciplinary research activities with faculty specializing in electrical and mechanical engineering, as well as psychology and cognitive science.
Read about the other Penn faculty members elected alongside Davidson and Watts at Penn Today.