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  Peter Rogerson

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  Tarunraj Singh

By SUE WUETCHER

Published: December 8, 2011

UB faculty members Peter Rogerson and Tarunraj Singh have been elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of Science, one of the premier, peer-reviewed, general science journals in the world.

They are among 539 AAAS members who have been recognized as 2011 Fellows by their peers for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

The Fellows will receive an official certificate and a gold-and-blue—representing science and engineering, respectively—rosette pin during the AAAS Fellows Forum being held as part of the 2012 AAAS annual meeting in February in Vancouver, B.C.

Rogerson, professor in the Department of Geography, College of Arts and Sciences, was named a fellow in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the field of spatial science, particularly for spatial modeling of migration and for new methods of spatial analysis.

Singh, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was recognized for pioneering contributions in the field of controller design for vibration attenuation of flexible structures by synthesizing novel techniques to address the issue of uncertainties in the system model.

A UB faculty member since 1986, Rogerson previously was on the faculty at Northwestern University. He served two stints as UB geography department chair—from 1991-94 and from 2007-10—and has held an adjunct appointment in the Department of Biostatistics since 2003.

His research interests are in the areas of demography and population change, epidemiology, spatial statistics and spatial analysis. His current work focuses on developing new methods to quickly detect newly emergent clusters in geographic data; for example, determining as quickly as possible whether there is a new cluster of crime or disease.

A prolific scholar, he is the author or co-author of five books and nearly 100 articles in refereed journals. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Justice, among other funding sources.

Rogerson has received numerous awards over the course of his career, including a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a Sustained Achievement Award from the UB Exceptional Scholars Program.

He earned a BA from Albany University, an MA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from UB.

Singh joined the UB faculty as an assistant professor in 1993 after serving as an assistant research engineer at Texas A&M University. His research focus lies in the area of control and estimation: Control is the branch of engineering concerned with generating precisely the right inputs to generate a desired output, while estimation allows engineers to model how systems will behave in the future and to quantify the uncertainty associated with that model.

Applications of Singh’s research range from better forecasting of natural and manmade disasters to enhancing the precision of robotic systems.

The author of “Optimal Reference Shaping for Dynamical Systems: Theory and Applications,” Singh has published more than 175 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers.

A fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he has received other numerous awards, among them the Teetor Award for engineering education from the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, a NASA summer faculty fellowship and a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He twice was awarded the Riefler Award, which honors outstanding junior faculty in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

He was educated at Bangalore University, the Indian Institute of Science and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where he received a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1991.