Three members of the Brown University faculty, including Engineering’s Linda Abriola, have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers, who nominate fellows for election by the AAAS Council, the association’s policymaking body.
AAAS recognized Abriola for “outstanding contributions to our understanding of the transport and persistence of contaminants in the subsurface and the design of remedial strategies.”
Abriola is an expert on the integration of mathematical modeling and laboratory experiments for studying and predicting the transport and fate of reactive contaminants in the subsurface. Her current research focuses on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), more commonly known as forever chemicals. She is particularly known for her work on the characterization and remediation of groundwater contaminated by chlorinated solvents and was one of the first to develop a mathematical model that describes how these organic chemical pollutants travel within groundwater and contaminate it.
Abriola joined Brown in January 2021 as the Joan Wernig and E. Paul Sorensen Professor of Engineering. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. She has won numerous awards including the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program Project of the Year Award in Remediation and the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Groundwater Prize.
She was joined by Brown’s Alfred Ayala, professor of surgery (research) and Brendan Hassett, professor of mathematics and director of Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, as 2023 AAAS Fellows. The newest class of fellows from across the world includes 508 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements. The new class will be featured in the journal Science in February 2023, and honored at an in-person celebration this spring.
Brown Engineering professors George Karniadakis (2018), Nitin Padture (2008) and Sharon Swartz (2017) are all fellows of AAAS as well.