Dr. Cecilia Gerber named AAAS Fellow
Adapted from UIC researchers earn distinction as AAAS fellows | UIC Today
Dr. Cecilia Gerber has been elected to the newest class of American Association for the Advancement of Science fellows, one of the top honors within the scientific community.
Cecilia Gerber, UIC Distinguished Professor of physics, will join the 2021 class of AAAS Fellows, which includes 564 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.
Gerber was honored in the physics discipline for the development of instrumentation to identify long-lived particles, leadership in the discovery of single top quark production and production of top quark pairs, as well as for broadening participation of underrepresented students in science.
Her research is centered on the experimental study of hadron collisions at the highest energies available. Her work involves the development of semiconductor detectors that precisely track the passage of charged particles and the elucidation of the characteristics of the production processes of top quarks and searches for new physics that decay preferentially to top quarks.
Gerber, who has published more than 1,000 papers in leading scientific journals, is a member of the D-Zero collaboration at Fermilab and the Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
At UIC she has advised numerous graduate and undergraduate students and serves as director of undergraduate studies in the physics department. In 2019, she joined the leadership team for a UIC project funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive Excellence Initiative that aims to improve the inclusion of students from diverse backgrounds in science education. Prior to arriving at the university in 2000, she was a research associate at Fermilab, where she served as coordinator of the LHC Physics Center from 2017-2020.
She is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, University of Illinois Scholar, fellow of the UIC Honors College, and 2011 UIC Researcher of the Year.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals.