VCU Engineering Professor Named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences

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Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D., Caudill Eminent Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Gad-el-Hak was honored for seminal contributions to a broad range of science and engineering fields, including turbulence, flow control, experimental methods, microelectromechanical systems and large-scale disasters. He is one of 702 individuals who will be honored this year by AAAS on the basis of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

Gad-el-Hak says he is particularly proud to be an engineer among many scientist fellows of AAAS.

“I’m interested in the marriage between science and engineering,” he says. “Science attempts to understand the world while engineering attempts to improve the world.”

New fellows will be recognized during the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.

Gad-el-Hak is world renowned for his engineering research, holds two patents, has authored 19 books and 460 scientific articles and is a fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

In 1998, Gad-el-Hak was named the 14th ASME Freeman Scholar. In 1999, he was awarded the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Prize - Germany's highest research award for worldwide scientists and scholars in all disciplines – and the Japanese Government Research Award for Foreign Scholars. In 2002, Gad-el-Hak was named ASME Distinguished Lecturer, as well as being inducted into The Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874.