Strassmann, professor and chair of Rice's department of ecology and evolutionary biology, and Queller, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, were each selected for their pioneering efforts on the evolution of sociality.

AAAS, the world's largest general scientific society, publishes the weekly journal Science, which has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed scientific journal in the world.

Few AAAS members are elevated to the rank of Fellow. Fellows are selected because of their efforts to advance science or scientific applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Queller and Strassmann are among 308 Fellows elected this year. 2005 AAAS Fellows are named in this week's edition of Science. They will be honored at a ceremony on Saturday, Feb. 19, at the 2005 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

"How delightful that Drs. Strassmann and Queller get to share the honor of being elected AAAS Fellows in the 20th year of their intellectual collaboration!" said Kathleen Matthews, dean of Rice's Wiess School of Natural Sciences. "Their research in the study of cooperation and conflict among social insects has been pioneering, and they are again breaking new ground with their most recent work on social amoebae."

Strassmann joined Rice in 1980. Her research centers upon cooperative alliances that have proven successful both evolutionarily and ecologically. She is particularly interested in how these alliances came to be, how conflicts are subsumed into cooperation, what conflicts remain and how they influence sociality. Strassmann has conducted fieldwork on social insects in Italy, Brazil, Venezuel
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Contact: Jade Boyd
jadeboyd@rice.edu
713-348-6778
Rice University
28-Oct-2004