Gammie, Selvin elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024)

Illinois Physics Professors Paul Selvin and Charles Gammie have been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honor societies in the nation. Academy members, leaders in the arts and sciences, business, philanthropy, and public affairs, work to address societal challenges, making nonpartisan recommendations to policymakers and leaders in government, higher education, and the private sector.

Written by Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics

Illinois Physics Professors Paul Selvin and Charles Gammie have been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honor societies in the nation. Academy members, leaders in the arts and sciences, business, philanthropy, and public affairs, work to address societal challenges, making nonpartisan recommendations to policymakers and leaders in government, higher education, and the private sector.

Charles F. Gammie

Gammie’s research in theoretical and computational astrophysics has touched on black holes; star, planet, and moon formation; relativistically hot plasmas; and interstellar turbulence. He and his team develop numerical methods that enable work on otherwise intractable astrophysical problems.

Gammie led the Theory Working Group of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which captured the first image of a black hole, unveiled in April 2019. For this work he was named one of The Bloomberg 50 and shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, and the Einstein Medal of the Albert Einstein Society. As the EHT Collaboration expands its exploration of black hole physics, Professor Gammie continues to lead its theoretical thrust, working with his team to develop state-of-the-art numerical models to elucidate the petabytes of new data now being collected by the EHT.

Gammie is the Ikenberry Endowed Chair at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. is He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Among his other accolades, he won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2002), was selected a University of Illinois System University Scholar (2007–2010), and was a Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics (2015–2016). His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Gammie received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University in 1987 and his doctoral degree in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 1992. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the University of Cambridge prior to joining the Illinois faculty in 1999. He served as Chair of the Astronomy Department from 2011 to 2014.

Paul Selvin

Selvin is a biological physicist who has developed ground-breaking fluorescence instrumentation and techniques at the intersection of physics and biochemistry to elucidate the properties and behaviors of biomolecules in living cells. Today, scientists around the world use these tools in their laboratories.

Research in the Selvin group follows four major thrusts: elucidating the behavior of molecular motors; molecular organization of the synapses in the brain and the mechanisms behind how these synapses “learn” and “forget;” transcription factor dynamics in terms of transportation and response to environmental stimuli; and intracellular labelling of living cells using a bacterial protein.

Selvin’s work at the intersection of neuroscience and physics is shedding new light on communications occurring between individual synapses in neurons. For this work, his group developed innovative techniques to manufacture extremely small quantum dots, enabling penetration of the synapse and establishing new inroads in this subfield.

Selvin developed a technique called FIONA (fluorescence imaging with one nanometer accuracy), which his group used for in vivo studies that elucidated the hand-over-hand locomotion mechanism of single-molecule myosin V, myosin VI, and kinesin. This technique brought into focus a new and deeper understanding of the biomechanics at work in living cells.

Selvin also developed the single-molecule FRET (fluorescence resonance energy transfer) technique, with colleagues Johns Hopkins Professor Taekjip Ha and University of California, Los Angeles Professor Shimon Weiss. This breakthrough innovation took FRET to its ultimate sensitivity and is now widely used across the field of biophysics.

In his early career, Selvin devised the lanthanide resonance energy transfer (LRET) technique to investigate the chemical properties and structural dynamics of DNA systems. The LRET technique, which offered a 100-fold improvement in signal-to-background resolution over conventional techniques, remains in wide use today by the pharmaceutical industry for drug discovery.

Selvin received his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1983 from the University of Michigan and his doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990. He held postdoctoral appointments at Cal Berkeley’s chemistry department from 1991 to 1993, and then worked in that department as a research chemist from 1993 to 1995. He was then a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1995 to 1997, before joining the faculty at Illinois Physics in 1997.

Selvin is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center for Quantitative Cell Biology at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC.

Selvin has been recognized with numerous honors, including the 2022 Ignacio Tinoco Award of the Biophysical Society; the 2020 Gregorio Weber Award for Excellence in Fluorescence Theory and Applications, presented by the Biological Fluorescence Subgroup of the Biophysical Society; a 2014 Grass Foundation Fellowship in Imaging; a 2010 Nikon Marine Biology Laboratory Fellowship; the 2006 International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Biophysics; the 2004 Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators, presented by the Biophysical Society; the 2000 Cottrell Scholar Award of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement; and the 1999 Young Fluorescence Investigator Award of the Biophysical Society.

Selvin was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004 and was elected to the General Council of the Biophysical Society in 2004. At Illinois, he was he was selected a University Scholar in 2006 and a Sony Faculty Scholar in 2004. He was also named a 2000 Beckman Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hanco*ck, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good.