Two UC Davis faculty members have been welcomed into prestigious academies:

• Berni J. Alder, professor emeritus in the Department of Applied Science and a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• George G. Roussas, distinguished professor in the Department of Statistics, elected as a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens, Greece.

Alder is widely regarded as the founder of molecular dynamics, a type of computer simulation used for studying the motions and interactions of atoms over time.

Alder did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley and, in the late 1940s, studied for his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, where he met computer designer Stan Frankel. Using CalTech's mechanical computers, Alder and Frankel developed a computer technique, now called the Monte Carlo method, for calculating results from random sampling. Edward Teller and colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory developed essentially the same technique independently.

Alder continued developing his ideas at UC Berkeley and became a consultant to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when it opened in 1952 under Teller's leadership. At the time, the connection to Livermore provided access to some of the only electronic computers in the nation. Alder joined the national lab full-time in 1955 and published his pioneering work on molecular dynamics in 1956.

In 1963, Alder helped found the UC Davis Department of Applied Science, which offers undergraduate and graduate programs in physical sciences and engineering at UC Davis and at Livermore. Among numerous other honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Today, molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods are now widely used across a wide range of sciences, from fundamental physics to molecular biology. But at the time, those methods marked a radical change in how scientists thought about such problems, said Ann Orel, professor and chair of the Department of Applied Science.

"What he did was amazing," Orel said. "It was really out-of-the-box thinking for the times."

Roussas said he was delighted to be elected as a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens, considered to be "a place at the top of Olympus," he said. He is only the fourth mathematical scientist admitted to the academy from outside Greece.

He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Athens, Greece, and his doctorate in statistics from UC Berkeley. He was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 10 years, reaching the rank of full professor.

In 1972, he took up the chair of applied mathematics and the directorship of the laboratory of applied mathematics at the University of Patras, Greece, where he was also elected dean of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and, later, chancellor of the university. He also served for about three years as the appointed vice president for Academic Affairs of the then-new University of Crete, Greece.

In 1984, he came to UC Davis as a visiting professor, and in 1985 was appointed as associate dean to lead the intercollege Division of Statistics and as chair of the graduate group in statistics. He continued in those positions until 1999, when the division became the Department of Statistics.

Roussas cited his contributions to raising the profile and quality of statistical research at UC Davis as his major achievements as associate dean and graduate group chair. He also helped to establish the flourishing graduate program in biostatistics.

Roussas' own research involves setting up probability models to describe what is happening in the world around us.

"These models contain unknown quantities, and it is the job of a statistician to make inferences about those quantities," said Roussas, the author of 17 books and manuals.