UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Vasant G. Honavar, professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was elected by the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication for his distinguished contributions to research and leadership in data science.
Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed by peers upon members of the AAAS, the world's largest general scientific society and the publisher of the journal Science. He is one of three Penn State researchers elected in 2018 and will be recognized during a ceremony in February at the society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
“It took me by surprise,” said Honavar. “It’s a wonderful honor to be recognized by an organization that has done so much to advance science and engineering and to be included among AAAS Fellows who have dedicated their lives to advancing science and its applications."
“I am very gratified and humbled that my distinguished colleagues considered me for this honor,” he added. “Scientific advances require passion, insight, collaboration and teamwork. I am grateful to the wonderful mentors, colleagues and students that have contributed to my success as a scientist. I share this honor with all my collaborators.”
Honavar’s current research and teaching interests span a variety of fields, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, data sciences, biomedical and health informatics, and many others. He has published more than 300 research articles and several books.
He currently serves on the faculties of Penn State’s graduate programs in informatics, computer science and engineering, bioinformatics and genomics, neuroscience, social data analytics and operations research, and the undergraduate data sciences program. He is affiliated with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the Institutes for Energy and the Environment, and the Social Science Research Institute.
Honavar is director of the Penn State Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, associate director of the Penn State Institute for CyberScience, informatics co-lead of the Penn State Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, and co-director of an NIH-funded interdisciplinary doctoral program in biomedical data sciences.
Honavar’s previous awards and honors include his election as a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2018. He was named among the “125 People of Impact” by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016, and was named the inaugural Sudha Murty Distinguished Chair of Neurocomputing and Data Science at the Indian Institute of Science in 2016. Honavar received the National Science Foundation Director's Award for Superior Accomplishment in 2013 and the National Science Foundation Director's Award for Collaborative Integration in 2012. He received the Iowa Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in 2007.
Prior to joining Penn State, Honavar served on the faculty of computer science and bioinformatics and computational biology at Iowa State University from 1990 to 2013. Honavar earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also received a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Drexel University, and a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Bangalore University.