{"id":179629,"date":"2023-02-03T11:28:44","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T16:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/?p=179629"},"modified":"2023-07-10T13:22:59","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T17:22:59","slug":"two-uri-faculty-members-named-aaas-fellows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/news\/two-uri-faculty-members-named-aaas-fellows\/","title":{"rendered":"Two URI faculty members named AAAS fellows"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Feb. 3, 2023<\/span><\/div>\n
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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Clinical Professor and GSO alum Sunshine Menezes (Ph.D. 2005) and Professor of Oceanography Steven D\u2019Hondt<\/a> to the rank of AAAS Fellow.<\/a> The organization recognizes those whose work on behalf of \u201cthe advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically or socially distinguished.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two were nominated by colleagues for the rank but were still surprised with the news. \u201cI had zero expectation that I would be elected,\u201d Menezes said. \u201cThe people who have been recognized in the past include a lot of really monumental figures in science. I\u2019m just amazed and honored to be considered in the same sentences as these folks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe award is important, but what was really nice is to have people nominate me and to have the support of my colleagues,\u201d D\u2019Hondt said.<\/p>\n

According to the AAAS, Menezes was recognized for her work at the Metcalf Institute in contributing to science and environmental communication, and especially for her efforts to increase inclusivity in those areas. \u201cThe Association\u2019s mission runs the gamut of scientific disciplines, and that is very rare for a scientific association,\u201d Menezes said. \u201cThe AAAS has historically put a lot of stock in the value of science communication and public engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The issue of inclusion has been a top priority at the Metcalf Institute from the beginning, Menezes said. The Institute launched its first SciComm Symposium in 2018 with the aim of giving voice to a wide range of communicators. \u201cThe whole intention of that symposium was to demonstrate that there are people doing inclusive science communication in all kinds of ways. That includes journalism, but it also includes informal science learning at museums or after school programs and various types of public engagement and social media. There are people out there who really are focusing on equity and inclusion as the foundation for that work. And so we wanted to create this symposium as a way to bring those people together.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our training for journalists, for example, we\u2019ve been attentive to trying to have a diverse range of speakers in terms of race and ethnicity and gender. In all our programs, we\u2019ve become a lot more thoughtful and attentive to issues of accessibility. We\u2019re learning along the way, so we hire sign language interpreters, we make sure that there\u2019s captioning. We want to make sure that our programs are accessible, and we\u2019re just much more intentional about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also are trying to help journalists figure out what inclusive journalism looks like. For example, when you\u2019re covering an environment story, and there is some sort of marginalized community that\u2019s affected by this issue, it\u2019s very common for reporters to present that community simply as victims. And so, in our annual workshop we\u2019ve been trying to address that by having sessions in which we talk about how to demonstrate the expertise and agency that communities are bringing to these issues themselves, whether the communities are affected by sea level rise, or air quality problems, or whatever. We\u2019re developing programs for journalists to help them think about how they\u2019re covering communities that often are either ignored or are portrayed in very simplistic or stereotypical way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steven D\u2019Hondt\u2019s recognition was for his long-time work in examining subsurface life. \u201cThere have been people looking at subsurface life since the 1920s. The earliest studies were people looking at bacteria coming out of oil and gas wells, in the formation fluid. That\u2019s a very special environment. And then in the 1960\u2019s, marine chemists began noticing chemical signatures in fluid from beneath the surface, that in their mind required life. They were the sort of chemical reactions that only organisms undertake. Beginning in the \u201880s, people started actually looking for life beneath the sea floor, but it was an intermittent ad hoc kind of thing. A little over 20 years ago, I began pushing to take a more systematic view of it, leading expeditions and different kinds of analyses to try and understand what is down there and what it is doing. It\u2019s that work that the AAAS is recognizing.\u201d D\u2019Hondt has spent most of his professional life looking at the interplay between the living and physical worlds, mostly through marine sediment. In beginning this work, he turned from simply regarding marine sediment as an archive of past life to recognizing it as a global habitat of living organisms.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Hondt says that his research group and their collaborators have not only uncovered microbes in the subsurface that closely resemble those living at the sea floor but found that microbes could live far longer than expected and withstand the extreme conditions found beneath the seafloor. Perhaps most intriguing of all, they discovered live microbes in conditions where they were not thought to exist. \u201cThe organisms are generally starving. We look at sediment as old as 100 million years, and we have microbes living in it that can be revived.<\/p>\n

\u201cI co-led one expedition with a friend from Japan, and one of our Japanese investigators did a study that showed that microbes from 104-million-year-old sediment, if we offer them diverse molecules, they wake up and eat them all. It\u2019s like, oh my god, here\u2019s a smorgasbord! And then they reproduce.\u201d<\/p>\n

D\u2019Hondt credits the organization for publishing excellent journals. \u201cThey actually published the journal where my first paper came out. So in a sense, I\u2019ve been relying on that community for my entire career, ever since I was an undergrad. It\u2019s a community that works to promote and support science. And they\u2019ve supported me by providing this platform.\u201d D\u2019Hondt credits the organization for its ability to go to the US government and the general public with concerns they may have on an issue, as well as being able to relay information from the government to its members.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, it serves as an important player in the public conversation of science in America and it\u2019s an important player in the discussion of science in the world. One of the things that is a little unusual about AAAS as compared to many other science-focused societies is you don\u2019t have to be a scientist to belong. It\u2019s essentially there to support and distribute scientific understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was written by Hugh Markey.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Clinical Professor and GSO alum Sunshine Menezes (Ph.D. 2005) and Professor of Oceanography Steven D\u2019Hondt to the rank of AAAS Fellow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4762,"featured_media":181638,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[897,1246],"class_list":["post-179629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-steven-dhondt","tag-sunshine-menenzes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179629"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181639,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179629\/revisions\/181639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}