Adjunct Professor Ian Maddieson, Department of Linguistics, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowned upon members by their peers.

This year, 388 members, including Maddieson, will be among those honored on Saturday, Feb. 15 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago. Each is honored by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. The AAAS Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on November 29.

Maddieson, who attained professor emeritus status from the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to UNM, was honored for distinguished contributions to linguistic science and field research in phonetics, leading to discoveries of phonetic universals, linguistic typology and the complexity of human language.  

Maddieson earned a Ph.D. in linguistics/phonetics, from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977. He took his first degree in English at Oxford University before studying Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. After teaching for four years in Nigeria, he came to the U.S. to complete his Ph. D. He held a research appointment at UCLA for 22 years before moving to Berkeley.

His main interests are in phonetic and phonological universals and he has collected data on many languages in the field to enrich the empirical database on which these are founded. Areas of particular interest are the languages of Africa and the Pacific region, including the Pacific Northwest. His major publications include Patterns of Sounds (1984) and The Sounds of the World's Languages (1996), co-authored with Peter Ladefoged.

This year’s AAAS Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on Nov. 29, 2013.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee’s institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer. Fellows must have been continuous members of AAAS for four years by the end of the calendar year in which they are elected.

Each steering group reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list.

The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.