AAAS welcomes 2 Indiana University faculty as 2023 fellows

Two Indiana University faculty have been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2023 fellows class. This prestigious, lifetime honor recognizes scientists, engineers and innovators for their achievements in research, teaching and administration, as well as excellence in communicating science to the public.

IU Bloomington’s Caroline Chick Jarrold and Luis Chaves are among 502 newly elected as fellows who are at the forefront of scientific achievements in emerging technologies, environmental issues and more.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world’s largest scientific society. In addition to publishing the journal Science, the association has awarded fellowships since 1874. One of the association’s first elected fellows was former IU faculty member Daniel Kirkwood, an astronomer and namesake of the university’s Kirkwood Hall, Kirkwood Observatory and Kirkwood Avenue. This year’s faculty elections bring the total number of AAAS fellows affiliated with IU to 140.

“Being named an AAAS fellow is further validation of Caroline’s and Luis’ tremendous success as researchers, and the impact they have made advancing scientific discovery and innovation,” IU Vice President for Research Russell J. Mumper said. “We are thrilled to have two more IU faculty join this distinguished group.”

AAAS fellows are nominated by either the association’s steering groups or by three previously elected fellows.

Caroline Chick Jarrold

Caroline Chick Jarrold. Photo courtesy of the Department of ChemistryChick Jarrold is the associate dean for natural and mathematical sciences and research, the Herman B Wells Professor of Chemistry and an adjunct professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

She was elected to AAAS for her contributions to advancing the discipline of chemistry through innovative studies on electron-neutral interactions that use novel approaches to anion photo-detachment spectroscopy, which is used to study chemical species ranging from single atoms to biomolecules.

Chick Jarrold’s expansive experiments are aimed at understanding the role electrons play in chemical and physical processes, including interstellar matter, single-molecule magnets, electron-driven synthetic chemistry and more. Her research spans several sub-disciplines of chemistry, rooted in a desire to understand the interactions between low kinetic energy electrons and neutral molecules. She also collaborates with theoreticians at the University of California at Merced, University of Louisville and Southeastern Louisiana University to create experiments that push the limits of computational chemistry.

She previously held a chemistry faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been a chemistry professor at IU since 2002.

Her research has appeared in more than 110 publications. Most recently, Chick Jarrold published work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that explores the impact of an electron on the reactive center on fluorophenyl radicals. The study found that these reactive species, which are building blocks in the synthesis of cancer therapeutics and treatments of antibiotic-resistant infections, can be structurally affected by their charge state, offering insights on how synthetic chemists can control the final structure of their desired product molecule.

Luis Chaves

Luis Chaves. Photo by Wendi Chitwood, Indiana UniversityChaves is an associate professor in the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. He also holds an adjunct position in the Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences, and he is also affiliated with the Tobias Center at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies and the Ostrom Workshop Program in Food and Agrarian Systems. He was a member of the inaugural class of the National Institutes of Health’s Climate and Health Scholars program.

Chaves was elected to the AAAS for his distinguished contributions to understanding vector-borne diseases and their transmission.

His research investigates the circumstances that allow vectors — insects such as mosquitos, ticks and sand flies — to spread diseases across several continents. He also examines social systems and the impact that some vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, have on socio-economic inequities.

Climate is also an important aspect of his research, as he studies how climate change affects vector-borne disease transmission and mosquito populations.

Before coming to IU in 2022, he was an associate researcher at Gorgas Memorial Research Institute in Panamá, an external faculty member of entomology at University of Panamá, a senior researcher at the Costa Rican Institute for Research and Training on Health and Nutrition and an assistant professor at the Nagasaki University Institute of Tropical Medicine in Japan.

He has directed research projects in Costa Rica, Panamá, USA, Venezuela and Japan, and he has collaborated on projects in Canada, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Taiwan, Korea, Vanuatu and Kenya, among other places. Chaves’ research has been published in over 120 papers focused on insect vectors, vector-borne diseases and other diseases sensitive to environmental change.