Faculty & Staff
Two Engineering Professors Named Fellows of AAAS
Professors Scott Banta and Jason Nieh have been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the oldest scientific societies in the world.
Chemical Engineering Professor Scott Banta and Computer Science Professor Jason Nieh have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.
“We are so proud to see our professors, Scott Banta and Jason Nieh, receive this distinguished lifetime honor from the AAAS,” said Columbia Engineering Dean Shih-Fu Chang. “Their excellence and dedication as researchers and their service to their students and colleagues has greatly benefited both Columbia and the wider scientific community.”
471 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 disciplines make up this year’s class of fellows. The new class of fellows will be inducted at the Fellows Forum, a special ceremony on June 7, 2025, in Washington, DC. Last year, the Fellows program celebrated its 150th anniversary.
Scott Banta
Scott Banta, a professor of chemical engineering, is being recognized for leadership in chemical engineering and applications of protein engineering in biocatalysis, bioseparations, and bioenergy technologies. In addition to addressing fundamental mechanisms in enzyme function, his work in synthetic biology aims to generate new technology solutions to grand challenges facing humanity. This includes alternative platforms for biomanufacturing, the development of bioelectrochemical energy systems, and biological approaches for metal mining and processing.
Banta began teaching at Columbia Engineering in 2004. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at the Shriners and Massachusetts General Hospitals and Harvard Medical School. He earned a BSE in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1997, and a MS and PhD in chemical engineering from Rutgers University in 2000 and 2002, respectively.
Jason Nieh
Jason Nieh is a professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering and co-director of the Software Systems Laboratory. He is chief scientist of Certik, a blockchain security company. He has also served as a consultant to both government and industry, including as a technical advisor on the Microsoft Antitrust Settlement and as an expert witness before the U.S. International Trade Commission. Nieh has authored over a hundred peer-reviewed papers across a broad range of areas, including operating systems, virtualization, computer architecture, thin-client computing, cloud computing, mobile computing, computer security, formal verification, multimedia, web technologies, and performance evaluation. Technologies he developed are widely used in major operating system platforms, including Android and Linux; the largest cloud infrastructure providers; Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud; and ubiquitous Arm processors.
Nieh is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Other honors for his research work include a Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Department of Energy Early Career Award, numerous industry research awards, including those from Amazon, Google, and IBM, and various best paper and test of time awards, including those from MobiCom, OSDI, SIGCSE, SIGMETRICS, and SOSP. A dedicated teacher, he received the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award for his innovations in teaching operating systems and for introducing virtualization as a pedagogical tool, which has become common practice at universities around the world. Nieh earned his BS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering.
Lead Photo Caption: Scott Banta (center) in the lab.
Lead Photo Credit: John Abbott/Columbia Engineering