Four faculty members at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have been elected 2025 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , one of the most prestigious honors a scientist can receive. The honor recognizes efforts across disciplines — including research, teaching and technology as well as leadership in academia and industry. In recognition of their extraordinary achievements, AAAS Fellows are elected to a lifetime appointment by their peers on the AAAS Council.
UT has shown sustained strength in AAAS Fellowship recognition, with multiple faculty members elected each year. The latest additions bring the university’s total number of AAAS Fellows to 103.
This year’s elected faculty are Brad Binder of the College of Arts and Science’s Department of Biochemistry and Cellular Molecular Biology, Jennifer DeBruyn and Jie Zhuang of the UT Institute of Agriculture’s Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science, and Elisabeth Schussler of the College of Arts and Science’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
“The election of these faculty members as AAAS Fellows reflects the strength and influence of UT’s research community,” said Deborah Crawford, vice chancellor for research, innovation and economic development. “Their bold and innovative work is expanding knowledge, confronting challenges across the globe and inspiring tomorrow’s scientific leaders.”
Brad Binder
A professor and the associate head of UT’s Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology , Brad Binder works to understand how plants perceive and respond to signals from their environment by studying signal transduction — how cells detect cues and convert them into biological responses. His research centers on ethylene, which is both a simple gas and a plant hormone.
“It’s unusual that a gas is a hormone,” he said. “Unlike something like adrenaline in humans, ethylene diffuses. One plant can make it, and neighboring plants are exposed to it. That has fascinating implications.”
Ethylene is not only scientifically intriguing but also economically significant, with its ripening effect contributing to billions of dollars in post-harvest losses each year. Binder’s lab has uncovered a beneficial effect of brief exposure to ethylene: priming plants to grow larger and become more tolerant to stress.
In the past decade, his research has expanded beyond plants into bacteria and fungi.
Binder’s work sheds light on how one molecule in nature exerts profound effects across plants and microbes.
Jennifer DeBruyn
A professor of environmental microbiology in UT’s Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science — which is ranked among the top agricultural and biological engineering graduate programs in the U.S. — DeBruyn studies how microbial communities break down organic materials from agricultural plastics to animal and human remains.
“Decomposition is fundamental to how ecosystems function,” she said. “If we didn’t have decomposers or microbes to fuel that process, the planet would be covered in dead things.”
When she first began studying the microbial community associated with decomposition — called the necrobiome — nearly 15 years ago, little was known about which microbes were involved or how they functioned. A collaboration with UT’s internationally renowned forensic anthropology researchers opened the door to a new field of inquiry.
DeBruyn also studies how microbes interact with agricultural plastics and the microplastics they produce. As plastic use in farming has increased, so have concerns about microplastics accumulating in soil. Her group is working to understand what that means for soil and ecosystem health.
Her work reveals the unseen biological systems that keep ecosystems functioning and offers new ways to understand waste, death and sustainability in a changing world.
Looking ahead, DeBruyn is particularly interested in the science behind green burials — practices designed to reduce the environmental footprint of human burials.
Elisabeth Schussler
A professor in UT’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology — which is in the top 10% of ecology programs in North America based on research impact — Schussler studies how instructor practices and departmental culture shape student learning and outcomes.
“I’ve always been really interested in the power of instruction,” she said. “What we do in classrooms shapes the student experience, sometimes without us even knowing it.”
A major focus of her research is student anxiety, particularly in large introductory biology courses. Her work has shown that anxiety levels vary not only across different courses and instructors but also within sections of the same course taught by the same professor, affecting how students experience the same content.
Schussler also focuses on graduate teaching assistant professional development. In many large science courses, teaching assistants serve as the primary point of contact for first-year students, yet they often receive little formal training in teaching.
Since 2013, she has helped lead a national research coordination network examining how departments support TA professional development. As she works with collaborators across multiple universities, her research investigates the factors that influence whether departments invest in training graduate instructors. The goal is to develop a model that departments can use to assess their own practices and create more effective systems of teaching support.
As a biology education researcher working within a science department, Schussler occupies a space that is still relatively uncommon. She is proud to represent a growing community of scholars who treat education research with the same rigor as laboratory science.
Jie Zhuang
Zhuang, a professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science and the faculty lead of UT’s cluster hiring initiative in resilient agriculture and forest systems , works to understand how water, nutrients and contaminants move through soil in hopes to improve soil health for agriculture, clean water and resilient ecosystems.
Much of his work focuses on the constantly changing patterns of contaminant water movement that occur in natural environments due to rainfall. Unlike steady laboratory conditions, real soils experience fluctuating water velocity and pressure, making contaminant transport and distribution difficult to predict. Understanding those processes is critical to maintaining soil health, reducing pathogen risks and protecting groundwater and surface water.
Zhuang also researches the connections between food, energy and water. Rather than examining one problem at a time, he studies how agricultural, water and energy systems interact and how to reduce trade-offs between them.
“We don’t want food, energy and water systems competing for resources,” he said. “We want them to become mutually beneficial.”
Zhuang currently works on supporting smallholder farms, which make up nearly 90% of the roughly two million farms in the United States. While large farms can often adopt expensive precision technologies, small farms frequently cannot.
“We are trying to develop efficient but cost-effective solutions,” he said. “We want to transform smallholder farms into circular bioeconomy systems, which can make agriculture regenerative.”
Those systems emphasize reuse of local resources — from animal manure to crop residues — and incorporate wastewater reuse and renewable energy to create more self-sustaining agricultural operations.
A particularly proud moment for Zhuang was serving as corresponding editor of the recently published Handbook of Circular Bioeconomy , a project that brought together world-class scholars from 17 countries.