Prof. Lizy John has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.

John is one of three Cockrell School of Engineering faculty members and 11 total new honorees across the Forty Acres. The other AAAS fellows hail from the College of Natural Sciences, the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Moody College of Communication.

The honor recognizes important contributions to the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics — including pioneering research, leadership within a given field, fostering collaborations, and advancing public understanding of science.

The new fellows join more than 53 colleagues at the University who have earned the lifetime distinction. Nationally, AAAS elected 502 new fellows this year.

Lizy Kurian John holds the Truchard Foundation Chair in Engineering in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research focuses on designing, evaluating and benchmarking circuits and systems for emerging workloads such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Over the years, her research has developed accelerators, memory architectures, power models for processors and systems, novel machine learning architectures for edge inference, FPGAs tailored for machine learning, and benchmarking methodologies. Her current research focuses on developing efficient intelligent systems from edge to the cloud, specifically using weightless neural networks and neuro-symbolic learning.