Boston University’s Alice Cronin-Golomb seeks to fortify humanity against identity- and autonomy-robbing diseases of aging. The College of Arts & Sciences professor says she probes “the relation between the brain and psychological functions in healthy aging and in age-related neurodegenerative disease, especially Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.”
Her contributions to her field have put her in august company, as a newly minted fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest scientific society. She’s one of two new BU fellows, along with Plamen Ch. Ivanov, a CAS research professor of physics. AAAS fellows, selected since 1874, receive the title for life; previous inductees have included Thomas Edison and W.E.B. Du Bois.
In the BU Vision & Cognition Laboratory , Cronin-Golomb and her colleagues use a mix of neuroimaging, behavioral studies, and neuropsychological assessments to analyze cognition, sensation, perception, mood, sleep, and motor function. “We engage in basic research and apply our findings to the development of interventions to enhance quality of life in older adults,” she says. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and foundations and organizations, including the American Parkinson Disease Association.
“I am deeply honored to have been named a fellow,” says the 37-year BU faculty veteran. “AAAS is the most important general science organization in the US and perhaps in the world. This honor means that my research has been recognized outside of my specialty area of neuroscience and neuropsychology. It is very gratifying to feel that my work has had a significant impact, especially at this late stage of my career.”
AAAS honored Ivanov as the founder of network physiology, a multidisciplinary field studying how the “dynamic network interactions of human physiological systems lead to emerging states and functions at the organism level” and influence our health. He’s laying the groundwork to build the Human Physiolome , a dynamic atlas comprising thousands of network maps representing the body’s functional behavior under various conditions, spanning molecular interactions to organ systems.
“Our research demonstrates that, in order to fully understand health and disease, we need to understand the interactions and adaptive networks integration among physiological and organ systems” in the human body, says Ivanov, director of BU’s Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology . “Each physiological state—wake, sleep, sleep stages, rest, exercise, fatigue, cognition, stress, age—is characterized by a unique network structure and dynamics among systems.”
The research has implications, Ivanov says, for medicine—“tracking interactions among systems in real time is essential to develop treatments”—and even for smart electronics, where experts could apply laws of physiological networks to build next-generation robotics and artificial intelligence tools.
“It is a great honor to join a remarkable group of scientists as a AAAS fellow,” he says. “As a scientist who is working on the development of a new field that is intrinsically interdisciplinary, it is both validating and exciting to see that our pioneering research is being recognized.”
Ivanov’s research has been funded by NIH, the Office of Naval Research, the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, and the W. M. Keck Foundation.
“We are delighted to see two of our distinguished faculty recognized as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” says BU Provost Gloria Waters. “It’s a proud moment for Boston University and a reminder of the contributions our faculty make to advancing knowledge for the public good.”