USC AME Board of Advisors member Elaine S. Oran has been elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Oran, along with two other newly elected Honorary Fellows, will be recognized at the AIAA Aerospace Spotlight Awards Gala, May 11 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, in Washington, D.C.

The Honorary Fellow is the AIAA's most prestigious membership category. Honorary Fellows are individuals of eminence in aeronautics or astronautics, distinguished by long and highly contributive careers in the aerospace arts, sciences, or technologies. Nominees must be Fellows. With Orville Wright its first member, the ranks of Honorary Fellows are populated with the likes of Dryden, Grumman, Liepmann, Lighthill, Prandtl, G.I. Taylor, and von Karman.

In addition to the Honorary Fellowship, the AIAA has recognized Dr. Oran in 2002 with the Dryden Lectureship in Research Award. She is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society where she is a founding member and former chairman of the Division of Computational Physics. She was the recipient of the 1979 Arthur S. Fleming Award honoring outstanding federal employees; the WISE Award in Science (1988); the A.K. Oppenheim Prize in 1999, given by the Institute for the Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems, "for brilliant contributions to the theoretical or interpretative aspects of the Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems ... intended for an active scientist who is distinguished by showing how to analyze or what it means;" and the Ya. B. Zeldovich Gold Medal of the Combustion Institute in 2000, given "For outstanding contribution to the theory of combustion or detonation." In 2003 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "[f]or unifying engineering, scientific, and mathematical disciplines into a computational methodology to solve challenging aerospace combustion problems."

Dr. Oran earned an A.B. degree in Physics and Chemistry at Bryn Mawr College in 1966, an M.Ph. in Physics at Yale University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Sciences at Yale in 1972. After graduation she went to the Naval Research Laboratory where, since 1988, she has been a Senior Scientist for Reactive Flow Physics. She holds an honorary professorship in the Institute of Mathematics and Physics at Aberystwyth University, Wales; an Adjuct Professorship in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan; and has been a visiting professor at the University of Leeds, where she recently received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa.