Hochella receives top honor in American Association for the Advancement of Science
Michael F. Hochella, Jr., University Distinguished Professor of Geosciences at Virginia Tech, has been named a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Hochella, of Blacksburg, was one of 471 individuals given this honor in 2007 among the organization’s membership of more than 10 million scientists worldwide.
Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. Hochella was nominated for his pioneering contributions to the field of nano-bio-geochemistry, an area believed by many to be a critical part of studies of the global environment. He will be recognized along with the other newly named fellows at the AAAS annual meeting in Boston in February.
Hochella was the first in his field to use atomic-force and scanning-tunneling microscopes as well as high-resolution transmission electron microscopes to study surface properties at the atomic level. He has applied this research to many areas of earth science and mineralogy, particularly environmental contamination issues.
Hochella received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His sponsored research programs total $12 million. He has written more than 120 scientific papers in professional journals and books, and his published work has had more than 3,000 citations. He is also one of the three founding editors of Elements, a major international magazine in the field of mineralogy, petrology, and geochemistry.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million.
The College of Scienceat Virginia Tech gives students a comprehensive foundation in the scientific method. Outstanding faculty members teach courses and conduct research in biology, chemistry, economics, geosciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, and statistics. The college is dedicated to fostering a research intensive environment and offers programs in many cutting edge areas, including those in nanotechnology, biological sciences, information theory and science, and supports the university’s research initiatives through the Institute for Critical Technologies and Applied Sciences, and the Institute for Biomedical and Public Health Sciences. The College of Science also houses programs in intellectual property law and pre-medicine.
