Three UC San Francisco researchers have been named 2022 fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is the world’s largest general scientific society and publishes the influential Science family of journals.
Election to AAAS is one of the highest honors in science and recognizes important contributions to research, as well as teaching, mentoring, fostering collaboration and promoting public understanding of science.
Fellows are elected each year by the Council of AAAS, the organization’s member-run governing body. This year 508 scientists, engineers and innovators from two dozen disciplines were selected. They will be inducted in a ceremony in Washington D.C. in June.
UCSF’s fellows include:
Judith Auerbach, PhD
Judith Auerbach, PhD, a sociologist, who researches the social determinants of health. She is an expert on the HIV/AIDS response, as well as gender. Auerbach is a sociologist, independent science and policy consultant, and adjunct professor at the UCSF School of Medicine. She also works as a consultant to government agencies, non-profit and advocacy organizations and universities.
Auerbach has overseen research and evaluation at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and public policy at amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research). From 1995 to 2003, she oversaw the development of scientific and budgetary priorities across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for AIDS research in the social, behavioral and prevention sciences, as well as AIDS research related to women and girls.
She has worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, where she was the lead author of the 1994 book-length report, AIDS and Behavior: An Integrated Approach.
Atul Butte, MD, PhD
Atul Butte, MD, PhD, is a noted biomedical-bioinformatics researcher who builds computational tools to develop diagnostics, therapeutics and insights into disease. He is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, director of the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute and chief data scientist at the University of California Health System (UC Health).
Butte was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2015. He was recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science in 2013 for promoting science through publicly available data.
Butte is an inventor on 24 patents and co-founded three companies: Personalis, which provides medical genome sequencing services; Carmenta, which was acquired by Progenity and discovers diagnostics for pregnancy complications; and NuMedii, which finds new uses for drugs through open-access molecular data.
Bruce Ovbiagele, MD, MSc, MAS, MBA, MLS
His research focuses on improving stroke outcomes for underserved and vulnerable populations, and he leads NIH-funded studies on stroke in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa. He has received many awards for his work and serves as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA).
Ovbiagele is an elected member of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, Association of American Physicians, and National Academy of Medicine, and he is an elected fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, World Stroke Organization, American Academy of Neurology, American Heart Association, Royal College of Physicians, Royal Society of Public Health and African Academy of Science.