Four Cornell faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

Brian R. Crane, Barbara A. Crawford, Rui Hai Liu and Rosemary Stevens are among the 539 fellows elected in 2011. They will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum Feb. 18 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Crane, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, studies the structure, function and mechanism of protein systems that underlie signal transduction. In particular, he researches processes mediated by redox and photochemistry and those dependent on highly cooperative macromolecular assemblies. Projects include understanding circadian clock light sensors, bacterial transmembrane signaling, nitric oxide enzymology and general aspects of protein electron transfer.

Crane has made major contributions to understanding how transmembrane receptor systems assemble and signal, how and why bacteria produce nitric oxide, and how light signals are propagated by circadian clock light sensors.

Crawford, professor of science education in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and member of the graduate field of education, specializes in inquiry-based science teaching and learning.

Her contributions to science education research include how to support teachers in teaching the nature of science and science inquiry. Her leadership in several professional societies includes contributions to the National Association of Research in Science Teaching.

As principal investigator and director of the National Science Foundation-funded Fossil Finders: Using Fossils to Teach About Evolution, Inquiry and Nature of Science, Crawford stresses that one of the most important issues in science education is how to move teachers from teaching science as a rhetoric of facts to teaching science as inquiry.

Liu, Ph.D. '93, professor of food science, holds a joint appointment in the field of environmental toxicology and is a member of the graduate fields of food science and technology, and of environmental toxicology. A medical doctor, he researches the health benefits of antioxidants/phytochemicals in fruits, vegetables and whole grains; food genomics and functional foods for disease prevention and health promotion targeted at cancers, aging and inflammatory diseases; and natural products and herbal formulations for antiviral activity.

Liu has published more than 100 original scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and has been elected fellow of several academic societies. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Food Scienceand serves on the editorial boards of several other journals.

Stevens, a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in Social Medicine and Public Policy at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Department of Psychiatry, currently studies the creation of the U.S. Veterans' Bureau (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) and its health services after World War I.

Stevens has a strong interest in American medicine and its history and has chaired or been a member of national policy committees on such subjects as national blood policy, for-profit health care, physician assistants and nurse practitioners, alternative medicine, graduate medical education payments, and Medicare as social contract.

Stevens has won national awards in the history of medicine, history of public health and health services research, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her publications include books on the history of medical practice in England, the history of specialization in American medicine, the early implementation of Medicaid, physician migration policy and its implications, and the history of American hospitals.