PNNL

RICHLAND, Wash.—Pacific Northwest National Laboratory computational scientist and biological physicist Margaret Cheung has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society, and being elected as a fellow is the organization’s highest honor.

Fellows are elected annually by AAAS for significant contributions and achievements across a variety of scientific disciplines, spanning research to public communications. As noted by the society, those eligible for AAAS fellowship are members “whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.”

Cheung joined PNNL and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory—a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility located at PNNL-Richland—in 2021 and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington. She focuses her research on an approach that integrates physics and data to study how certain proteins interact and control living matter.

She is also the lead principal investigator of the DOE-funded Northwest Biopreparedness Research Virtual Environment (NW-BRaVE) Initiative, with a mission to design and lead new approaches for characterizing host-pathogen interactions for detection and prediction. The project integrates a wide range of molecular and cellular structure and advanced omics measurements, with the aid of artificial intelligence applications, to systematically and spatially map out the molecular footprints inside a microbial host upon viral infection.

After obtaining her doctorate in physics from the University of California, San Diego in 2003, Cheung worked at the University of Maryland under a Sloan Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, later going on to start her own laboratory at the University of Houston in 2006 and becoming a tenured and endowed Moores Professor. She has also served as a senior scientist and outreach director at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University.