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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the preeminent scientific institution in the United States, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, has elected Barbara Zurer Pearson, research associate in linguistics, and Don Towsley, Distinguished Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), as 2024 Fellows — a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.
 

Barbara Zurer Pearson: Pioneer in Assessing Children’s Language Abilities

Two decades after Zurer Pearson played an instrumental role in developing the groundbreaking Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV), it remains the best test for assessing diverse children’s language abilities. 

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Zurer Pearson, who prides herself on having “one foot in humanities and one foot in science,” was recognized by AAAS “for distinguished contributions to applied linguistics, particularly for work encouraging bilingual development and facilitating bias-free assessment of language in children who speak minoritized varieties of English.”

Her career as a researcher embodies a commitment to understanding and promoting bilingualism, a passion she developed during a Junior Year in Paris. She and her collaborators from around the world have made significant contributions to both theoretical research and practical applications in language education and assessment.

“For over 30 years, Zurer Pearson has made significant and lasting contributions in the field of linguistics,” says Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, dean of the UMass Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts. “Her research is the truest example of the socially impactful, transdisciplinary research that emerges when the humanities and sciences engage in co-equal collaboration. HFA is proud of Zurer Pearson’s many accomplishments and I congratulate her on this important recognition.”

When she was studying languages in college, Zurer Pearson says, “Linguistics was a dusty old humanity. It wasn’t a science at that point.” In fact, when she resumed her doctoral studies after relocating from Cambridge to Miami, she found there were no linguistics programs within 350 miles. So, she cobbled together a self-directed degree at the University of Miami spanning disciplines from psychology to computer science.

After earning her doctorate in applied linguistics and while serving as a lecturer and administrator in English at UMiami, Zurer Pearson and her colleagues launched the South Florida Bilingualism Study Group, which conducted influential research on how young people acquire and use two languages simultaneously. It is still cited today.

“We came up with a way of measuring abilities of bilingual children that gave them credit for all of their knowledge, and not just their English knowledge,” she explains.

In 1998, Zurer Pearson came to UMass Amherst as project manager for the interdisciplinary DELV project, developing an assessment that she admits was ahead of its time. 

“Now, 20 years later, it’s come more into its own,” Zurer Pearson notes. “It’s still one-of-a-kind.”

Zurer Pearson has also authored numerous academic articles and book chapters on bilingualism and language assessment. Her book for a general audience, “Raising a Bilingual Child,” offers practical guidance on nurturing bilingualism in children and has been reprinted in several languages. 

At the same time, working in the UMass Amherst Office of Research Development for 13 years, Zurer Pearson helped scholars across campus and around the country articulate the “broader impacts” of their research, and increase the representation of women and minorities in STEM fields. With support from the National Science Foundation, she helped organize a nationwide group to promote “language science for everyone” through informal learning, including Family Science Days at the AAAS annual meeting.

Now, as a “mostly retired” scholar who was never on the tenure track, Zurer Pearson says being elected an AAAS fellow came as a surprise. Despite her strong research record, she says, “I didn’t feel I was in the running for academic honors. I’ve considered it to my credit that I didn’t need outside validation … I will say, though, it’s nice to get a little, and just enough not to need any more.”
 

Towsley and the Modern Internet’s UMass Amherst Roots

Don Towsley, Distinguished Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has taught computing at UMass Amherst since 1976, where he founded and leads the Advanced Classical and Quantum Information Research Lab. Towsley is an acknowledged pioneer in digital networking. In 1999, he developed the first rigorous methodology for performing internet tomography, a technique for inferring internal network behavior based solely on end-to-end measurements. Fast-forward 26 years, and you’ll find Towsley helping to design the internet of the future by leading UMass Amherst’s efforts in helping to build networks based on quantum computing.

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“This AAAS election is an incredibly well-deserved honor for Towsley,” says Laura Haas, Donna M. and Robert J. Manning Dean of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences. “His pioneering work in classical and quantum network tomography has had a tremendous impact on computing and established UMass Amherst as the epicenter of research in this foundational area of the field.”

Towsley’s work on tomography received the prestigious ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award in 2012 and has stimulated considerable research in industry and peer academic institutions. 

In 2020, Towsley and colleagues received a five-year, $26 million initial grant from the National Science Foundation to form a new Engineering Research Center, the Center for Quantum Networks at the University of Arizona. Towsley co-leads one of three research thrusts focused on quantum network architecture and performs research on fundamental performance limits of quantum networks. A major direction of his research within the center is extending and applying the earlier tomography techniques to quantum networks. 

Thanks to a seed fund created by anonymous donors, including a gift of $5 million, Towsley is leading the creation of a UMass Amherst center of excellence to support research in quantum information systems. This center, bringing together researchers from CICS, the College of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences, will work on building quantum computers and developing a quantum internet to provide network security and to connect these new quantum computers. 

Previously, Towsley contributed foundational research to the development of modern Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP — a standard the defines the basic rules of the internet and how it delivers data. In a series of papers with colleagues starting in 1998, he developed the first model of the TCP protocol, accurately capturing TCP’s principal features of congestion avoidance and timeouts, and the first fluid model of a network carrying TCP traffic. 

With a student and colleagues, Towsley conceptualized a new area of information-theoretic security and established experimentally validated fundamental limits on the number of bits that can be transmitted reliably from a transmitter to an intended recipient without detection by an attentive adversary. This new research area, known as “covert communications,” has application in scenarios where hiding the existence of a signal can be critical. 

Towsley has made other pioneering contributions to the field of network modeling and analysis, ranging from the development of stochastic sample path and bounding techniques to the analysis of video streaming systems. He has published more than 500 papers and holds 11 U.S. patents.