John Peters, director of Washington State University’s Institute of Biological Chemistry, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Election as a AAAS Fellow is a distinction bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.
“It’s an honor to be nominated by people that I respect so much,” Peters said. “I’m greatly appreciative that they took the time and effort to nominate me and feel my work is valuable to our field.”
AAAS Fellows are recognized for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.
Peters’ work examines energy conservation at the molecular level and how life generates energy from food by shearing off electrons.
“We’ve done some groundbreaking work that’s laid the foundation for others to follow,” Peters said. “That’s the most rewarding part of my research, that a lot of significant science has been born out of the work my colleagues and I have done.”
That foundation includes discovering how to make energy much more efficiently. For example, it has the potential, though it’s still very early, to extract more energy from biomass when making biofuels, Peters said.
AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert! (www.eurekalert.org), the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS. See www.aaas.org.