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Fu Named AAAS Fellow

Joshua Fu

When Joshua Fu was growing up in Taiwan, on summer visits to his grandparents’ farm he was struck by the difference between the beautiful rural area and his heavy industrial city.

“I decided to devote my career to protecting the environment,” said Fu, the John D. Tickle Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) rewarded that career choice recently by selecting Fu as an AAAS Fellow. In its announcement, the organization noted Fu’s “distinguished contributions to the field of air quality and climate modeling and informing national and international management and policies involving these issues.”

“The AAAS is the world’s largest society dedicated to science across multiple disciplines and is very well respected, so to have a faculty member chosen as an AAAS Fellow is a wonderful honor for Dr. Fu, and a reflection of the high-quality, impactful work that he is doing,” said Janis Terpenny, Dean of the Tickle College of Engineering and Wayne T. Davis Dean’s Chair at the University of Tennessee. “We congratulate him, and look forward to his continued success in the future.”

His current research work focuses on climate-change impacts on energy infrastructure, air pollution, water availability, public health, and extreme events like heat waves, floods, and droughts, and has worked with NASA, the United Nations, and the Arctic Council.

He also recently helped lead a breakthrough study that highlighted the hidden toxins that are released during wildfires.

Related: Fu explains how toxins got into forests in the first place

Outside of his role in CEE, Fu helps connect UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory through joint appointments with both the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education and the Computational Earth Sciences Group in ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division.

Fu earned his bachelor’s in environmental engineering from Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University and his master’s in civil and environmental engineering at UCLA—both with a focus on water pollution—before focusing on air pollution while earning his doctorate in civil engineering from North Carolina State University.

The AAAS also selected Gladys Alexandre of UT’s Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology as a Fellow, giving the university at least 30 active faculty members so honored.

AAAS also publishes the journal Science. The AAAS Fellowship, dating back to 1874, is a lifetime honor that comes with an expectation that recipients maintain the highest standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity.