John Dabiri and Joseph Lazio Named 2025 AAAS Fellows

John O. Dabiri (PhD '05), Caltech's Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, and Joseph Lazio, a visiting associate in astronomy, have been named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world's largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.

According to the AAAS citation, Dabiri is being honored for "outstanding contributions in aeronautical and biological engineering." He is among nearly 500 scientists, engineers, and innovators who have been elected 2025 fellows for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements throughout their careers.

With a research focus on unsteady fluid mechanics and flow physics, Dabiri is known for his innovative approach in taking inspiration from unexpected biological systems like jellyfish and fish schools and combining biological experiments and field work with concepts from fluid mechanics to impact technologies ranging from wind energy to biomedicine. His current interests include investigating biological fluid dynamics in the ocean, exploring next-generation wind-energy projects, and developing new experimental methods. 

Dabiri joined Caltech's faculty as an assistant professor in 2005, after receiving his MS and PhD from the Institute in 2003 and 2005, respectively, and was named associate professor in 2009. He became a professor in 2010 and served as chair of the faculty from 2013–14 and as dean of undergraduate students from 2014–15. He accepted a faculty position at Stanford University in 2015 and then rejoined the Caltech faculty in 2019 as Centennial Professor.

In 2025, Dabiri received a National Medal of Science for his achievements. He has been honored with numerous other awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.

Lazio was a principal scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA, from 2010 to 2025, and is being honored by the AAAS for "for distinguished contributions to the field of radio astronomy, particularly exploratory projects at low frequencies, scientific guidance for NASA's Deep Space Network, and efforts to realize next-generation radio telescopes."

As an Interplanetary Network Directorate scientist at JPL, Lazio managed the science services infrastructure for the Deep Space Network, an international array of giant radio antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, as well as some that orbit Earth—in addition to providing radar and radio astronomy observations that improve our understanding of the solar system and the larger universe. He was also deputy principal investigator for JPL's Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE), an array of six toaster-sized CubeSats that will launch in summer 2026 and work together to study solar activity.

As a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav)—an NSF-funded Physics Frontier Center of more than 190 scientists from the United States and Canada—Lazio has helped explore the low-frequency gravitational-wave universe through radio pulsar timing.

Lazio has also served as project scientist for the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), as the deputy director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), and as project scientist for the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory. He observes routinely with the world's premier ground-based radio telescopes, including the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array and the Very Long Baseline Array in New Mexico.

Other Caltech alumni named 2025 AAAS fellows include Pamela Abshire (BS '92), Alejandro Alceves (MS '83), Alice Cronin-Golomb (PhD '84), Susy Carolina Kohout (BS '95),Sonia Kreidenweis (PhD '89), Ravi Ramamoorthi (BS/MS '98), Paul D. Ronney (MS '79), Ian B. Spielman (PhD '04), and Brian H. Toby (PhD '87).