Eric Kaler named AAAS fellow

Eric W. Kaler, dean of the College of Engineering and Elizabeth Inez Kelley Professor of Chemical Engineering, has been named a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This year, the distinction of fellow was awarded to 288 AAAS members, who were elevated to that rank because of their efforts toward advancing science or fostering applications that are deemed scientifically or socially significant.

Kaler was cited for "distinguished study and applications of the properties of complex fluids, including advances in the understanding of surfactant mixtures and in synthesis of new materials."

Kaler was named dean of the College of Engineering in 2000 and previously chaired the Department of Chemical Engineering for four years.

One of the first to receive a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1984, Kaler also received the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award from the American Society of Engineering Education in 1995 and the 1998 American Chemical Society Award in Colloid or Surface Chemistry. In 1999, he served as co-chair of the Gordon Conference on Supramolecular Chemistry.

Recently his research, with other UD colleagues, focuses on a new class of self-assembling microwires that can conduct electricity, according to the Nov. 2 issue of Science magazine.

The projects' principal investigator along with Kaler was Orlin Velev, formerly a research assistant professor in the University's Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Molecular and Engineering Thermodynamics, who has since joined the faculty of North Carolina State University.

The investigators were Simon Lumsdon, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical Engineering; Kevin Hermanson, a chemical engineering graduate student; and Jacob Williams, a summer research student from Carnegie Mellon University.

The research team reports in Science that is has found a new method for the assembly of a novel class of colloidal structures–porous metallic microwires, which are wires of diameter on the order of a micron, or one one-thousandth of a millimeter. For a complete story, visit the web site at [http://www. udel.edu/PR/experts/microwire. html].

A graduate of the California Institute of Technology, Kaler received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1982. He came to UD from the University of Washington in 1989 and was a visiting professor at the University of Graz in 1995.

He was named UD's Elizabeth Inez Kelly Professor of Chemical Engineering in 1998.

New fellows will be honored during the AAAS annual meeting, scheduled Feb. 16 in Boston.

The AAAS was founded in 1848 and represents the world's largest federation of scientists. The tradition of AAAS fellows distinction began in 1874.