Ambati Elected American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Dec. 12, 2011) − Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, professor and vice chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
 

Each year, the Council elects members whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.
 

Ambati is being honored for distinguished contributions to age-related macular degeneration and ocular angiogenesis; particularly for revealing surprising functions of chemokines, noncoding RNAs, and toll-like receptors in their pathogenesis.
 

Ambati's lab, which is funded by the National Eye Institute, has made numerous foundational contributions in macular degeneration research with multiple research articles published in Nature, Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
 

Ambati holds the Dr. E. Vernon Smith and Eloise C. Smith Endowed Chair in Macular Degeneration Research.
 

This year's AAAS Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News and Notes section of the journal Science on Dec. 23. Ambati, and the other new fellows, will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology during the AAAS Fellows Forum at the association’s annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Feb. 18, 2012.
 

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes 262 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, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. 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, and more. The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874.
 

For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.

Media Contact: Ann Blackford at (859) 323-6442 or ann.blackford@uky.edu