Two Rutgers professors and a professor at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School , are among 449 scientists named 2006 fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS fellows are Amy Cohen, professor of mathematics at Rutgers; Gaetano T. Montelione, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers; and Ann M. Stock, professor of biochemistry at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Montelione and Stock are also resident faculty members of the joint Rutgers/UMDNJ Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM).

AAAS, the pre-eminent U.S. scientific organization, selects fellows each year based on their efforts in advancing science or fostering applications considered scientifically or socially distinguished. It cited Cohen for “respected research in partial differential equations, and for effective service to the profession in scholarly publications, in education, and in advancing the status of women”; Montelione for “exemplary achievements in the development and applications of NMR methods to study biological structure and interactions and establishing the new field of structural genomics”; and Stock for “outstanding contributions to our understanding of protein structure/function and cell signaling mechanisms and for advancing graduate education.”

This year’s fellows will be honored February 17, 2007, at the association’s annual meeting in San Francisco. The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the prestigious journal Science.

Cohen, who joined the Rutgers faculty in 1972, has done research on partial differential equations used to describe physical phenomena in particle physics, astrophysics, and fiber optic communications. She also has developed teaching techniques that make classroom instruction in the physical sciences more engaging, effective and satisfying for students and faculty. She is helping future high school math teachers understand mathematics more deeply so they can communicate more flexibly with students.

Montelione, a Rutgers faculty member since 1989, is an expert in using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to study protein structures. He has pioneered methods to automate the analysis of three-dimensional protein structures, and has made those methods available to the scientific community in commercial software packages. He is applying NMR to the emerging fields of functional genomics and structural bioinformatics. Montelione is also director of the Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium, a large multi-institutional project providing thousands of three-dimensional protein structures as part of the international Human Genome Project.

Stock, who joined UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in 1991, studies information processing pathways within bacterial cells that enable bacteria to respond to changes in their environment. These molecular level signaling systems provide novel targets for developing antimicrobial drugs to combat infectious diseases.