The American Physical Society elects bioengineering professor Sergei Maslov as a fellow

10/6/2020

Congratulations to bioengineering professor Sergei Maslov for being elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society for his seminal discoveries and contributions to the dynamics and statistical physics of networks including complex biological systems.

Written by

The American Physical Society (APS) has elected bioengineering and physics professor Sergei Maslov as a fellow of the society.

The APS is a not-for-profit membership organization with a mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics for the benefit of humanity, promote physics and serve the broader physics community. 

Each year, members of the society recognize their peers through an election process. Less than one half of one percent of society members are elected as fellows annually. This year, Maslov is one out of three professors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to receive this prestigious recognition along with physics professor Yann Chemla and astrophysics professor Brian Fields. 

Maslov’s research involves theoretical studies and numerical models of complex biological systems, to shed new light on unanswered questions across a broad range of subdisciplines, including microbial ecosystems, genomics, systems biology, evolutionary biology, metabolic engineering of biofuels, and epidemiology of pathogens and infectious diseases.
Most recently, Maslov and physics professor Nigel Goldenfeld were the founding members of the Illinois governor’s COVID-19 Modeling Taskforce that was instrumental in guiding the state’s public health policies and response during the pandemic.

At Illinois, Maslov is a Bliss Faculty Scholar with appointments at the department of bioengineering, department of physics, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He also holds a joint appointment at the Argonne National Laboratory, Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences (CELS) directorate, where he works on Deep Neural Networks for cancer drug predictions. 

Maslov received his bachelor’s degree in 1989 and his master’s degree in 1992, each in physics and applied mathematics, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He received his doctoral degree in physics from The State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1996. He held postdoctoral appointments at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) from 1996 to 1998, after which he was hired on as a tenure-track physicist at BNL. Maslov received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2004. He joined the faculty at Illinois as a full professor in 2015.

Maslov was nominated to the APS Fellowship by the society’s Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics. The citation reads, “For [his] seminal discoveries and contributions to the dynamics and statistical physics of networks, with wide-ranging applications in physics, self-organizing systems, information networks, and complex biological systems.”


Share this story

This story was published October 6, 2020.