Six UCSB faculty researchers will soon be honored for their election to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Next month the group of scientists will travel to Chicago for a ribbon pinning. The individuals granted the distinction of Fellow in the AAAS include: Oliver Chadwick, professor of environmental studies; Mattanjah de Vries, geography department chair and professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Stanley Parsons, professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry; Susannah Scott, professor of chemistry and biochemistry; David Siegel, professor of geography and director of the Institute for Computational Earth System Science; and Herbert Waite, professor in molecular, cellular and developmental biology as well as chemistry and biochemistry.

The AAAS is the world’s largest society for general science and is responsible for publishing the prestigious journal Science. The coveted AAAS award recognizes achievement in many broad scientific fields. 486 recipients were honored over the past year.

Siegel said he is immensely honored by the AAAS award, and glad to contribute a prestigious award to UCSB’s tradition of academic excellence.

“[This award] is great for the campus and helps us build a national reputation as a great scholarly institution,” Siegel said. “Personally, I was surprised. This sort of thing is a career-based achievement. I’m not quite 50 and I have a lot to do still in my career – so that’s a bit weird. It also makes me feel old…but so do my kids who are becoming teenagers.”

Siegel said he was awarded a fellowship for studies involving the ocean’s ecosystem.

“I am being honored for ‘distinguished contributions to ocean optics, implications of mixing and stirring in the ocean, ocean bio-optics, ocean-color remote sensing, and spatial interactions in population dynamics,'” Siegel said. “I am a marine scientist who uses physical approaches (optics, fluid mechanics, etc.) to study change in the ocean’s ecosystems and biogeochemical cycling.”