The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Nina V. Fedoroff, science and technology adviser to the US Secretary of State and the US Agency for International Development, as AAAS president in 2011. Fedoroff, a geneticist and molecular biologist, is a pioneering researcher in the fields of plant genetics, plant responses to environmental stress, and genetically modified crops.
Last month, at the close of the 2010 meeting, Alice S. Huang began a one-year term as AAAS President. Huang, a senior faculty associate in biology at the California Institute of Technology, is the past president of the American Society for Microbiology and formerly dean for science at New York University. A member of several scientific advisory boards, Huang has also consulted on science policy for government agencies in Singapore and Taiwan.
The former president, Peter C. Agre, is now serving a one-year term as chairman of the AAAS Board of Directors. Agre, a 2003 Nobel Prize laureate, is the director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute and professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The AAAS is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to organising membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programmes that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide.
