Civil & environmental engineering professor Bill Cooper has been elected by his peers as a 2011 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Also head of UCI’s Urban Water Research Center, he was honored for distinguished interdisciplinary contributions in environmental photochemistry and free-radical chemistry in nature systems and in water treatment. His major research interests are sunlight-mediated photochemical reactions in natural waters and the free-radical chemistry of aqueous solutions. Cooper said the election has special significance for him: The world’s largest general scientific society, AAAS publishes the pre-eminent journal Science, which ran his first paper in 1967, when he was an undergraduate at Pennsylvania’s Allegheny College. Cooper will be officially welcomed Feb. 18 in Vancouver at the AAAS annual meeting.