Two members of the UF Health Cancer Center have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.
Carlos Rinaldi-Ramos, Ph.D., and Valérie de Crécy-Lagard, Ph.D., were among 19 faculty from the University of Florida elected to the newest class of fellows, breaking previous records for the number of faculty awarded in a single year. The honor, which includes alumni such as Thomas Edison and W.E.B. DuBois, is among the most distinctive in academia and recognizes extraordinary impact and achievement across disciplines, from research, teaching and technology, to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public.

Valérie de Crécy-Lagard, Ph.D.
Valérie de Crécy-Lagard, Ph.D., is a professor in the UF/Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences department of microbiology and cell science. In her research, de Crécy-Lagard works to discover the function of various bacterial genes, many of which are also found in humans. With the aid of bioinformatic tools, she and her team analyze available genomic and post-genomic data to make predictions about genes that can be tested in the laboratory.
Over the last 20 years, her work has uncovered the function of over 65 protein families covering several hundred thousand individual genes, mainly in the areas of nucleic acid modification and vitamin metabolism. She is a member of the Cancer Center’s Mechanisms of Oncogenesis research program.
Carlos M. Rinaldi-Ramos, Ph.D.

Carlos M. Rinaldi-Ramos, Ph.D., is the chair and professor in the department of chemical engineering and professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. He is an international leader in the fields of ferrohydrodynamics, biomedical applications of magnetic nanoparticles and diffusion of nanoparticles in complex and biological fluids.
In the field of nanomedicine, Rinaldi-Ramos has made outstanding contributions to harnessing localized nanoscale heating for magnetic nanoparticle thermal cancer therapy. He is a member of the Cancer Center’s Cancer Therapeutics & Host Response research program.