| | 1 | Name: | Mr. Neil Armstrong | | | Institution: | NASA | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | August 25, 2012 | | | | | | |
Neil A. Armstrong will always be known as the first man to walk on the moon, saying "One small step for (a) man. One giant step for mankind." as he stepped onto the surface. As a naval aviator, he flew combat missions from the aircraft carrier USS Essex in the Korean action, and subsequently spent 17 years with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as an engineer, research pilot, astronaut and administrator. As a research pilot for NASA's Flight Research Center at Edwards, CA, Mr. Armstrong was project pilot on many pioneering high speed aircraft, including the rocket powered X-1 and the hypersonic X-15. He was selected as an astronaut in 1962. He was commander of the Gemini 8 flight in 1966 when he performed the first successful docking of two vehicles in space. As spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, he, with colleagues Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin, completed the first landing mission to the moon. Neil Armstrong subsequently was responsible for the management of overall NASA research and technology work related to aeronautics. During the years 1971 through 1979, he was the University Professor of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He was the Chairman of the EDO Corporation, an engineering systems manufacturing firm. He received his engineering education at Purdue University and the University of Southern California. Mr. Armstrong was a Fellow of the Experimental Test Pilots and the Royal Aeronautical Society, and Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the International Aeronautical Federation. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco. He served as Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee for the Peace Corps (1971-73), as Vice Chairman of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986), and as a member of the National Commission on Space (1985-86). Mr. Armstrong's explorations on earth include reaching the North Pole and, with the British Army, mapping caves in the Oriente of Ecuador. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011 and was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2001. Neil Armstrong died on August 25, 2012, at the age of 82. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Neil Leon Rudenstine | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1992 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1935 | | | | | | |
An educator, administrator and literary scholar, Neil L. Rudenstine is president emeritus of Harvard University and chair of ARTstor, an initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to his fine work as a teacher and scholar of English literature, he has proved himself to be a clear-sighted academic administrator who is deeply imbued with and committed to intellectual inquiry and the life of the mind. Dr. Rudenstine studied the humanities at Princeton University (B.A., 1956) and later attended New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he received another B.A. and an M.A. In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard University. Most of Dr. Rudenstine's subsequent career has been dedicated to educational administration. Between 1968-88, he was a faculty member and senior administrator at Princeton University, serving as dean of students (1968-72), dean of the college (1972-77) and provost (1977-88). Previously, he served at Harvard from 1964-68 as an instructor and then as an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language. After his time as provost of Princeton University, he served as executive vice-president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 1988-91, becoming president of Harvard University in 1991 and serving until 2001. In addition to being an honorary Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, Dr. Rudenstine is Provost Emeritus of Princeton University as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2011, he replaced Catherine Marron as the Chair of the Board of the New York Public Library, on which he has served as a trustee since 2001. In 2012 he published The House of Barnes: The Man, the Collection, the Controversy, for which he won the John Frederick Lewis Award of the American Philosophical Society. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Neil H. Shubin | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Neil Shubin is a scientist, administrator, and writer. Throughout his career, he has been interested in understanding the great transitions of evolution. Leading expeditions around the globe in search of critical intermediate fossils, he has discovered fossil evidence for the origins of terrestrial vertebrates, mammals, frogs, salamanders and other major groups of animals. He also has revealed genetic and developmental mechanisms for these changes by using comparative laboratory-based approaches on modern animals. Linking studies of gene sequence, regulation and function with those of embryology and anatomy, Shubin has revealed deep similarities among different organs that tell of their origins. Educated at Columbia, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, Shubin has held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he currently holds the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professorship in Anatomy. He has held administrative positions at the University of Chicago (Departmental Chair, Associate Dean, and Senior Advisor to the President), The Field Museum (Provost) and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (Co-Director). He is the author of: Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, and Some Assembly Required. The former won the Phi Betta Kappa Science Book Prize and the National Academy of Sciences Scientific Communication Award. Shubin has also received the Distinguished Explorer's Award of the Roy Chapman Andrews Society. Your Inner Fish appeared on PBS as a three-part miniseries. Produced by Tangled Bank Studios of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute it won numerous awards, in eluding an Emmy. Shubin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Neil J. Smelser | | | Institution: | Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences | | | Year Elected: | 1976 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | October 2, 2017 | | | | | | |
Neil Smelser was born in 1930 in Kahoka, Missouri, and spent his youth in Phoenix, Arizona. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1952, a second B.A. from Oxford University in 1954 (M.A., 1959), and a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1958. He was a member of the department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958-94 and Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1994-2001. He published extensively in the fields of social theory, social change, economic sociology, social movements, the sociology of education, and psychoanalysis (he trained in psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1971). He was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1996, and was also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Neil Smelser died October 2, 2017, at the age of 87. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson | | | Institution: | American Museum of Natural History | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia.
In 2001, Tyson was appointed by President Bush to serve on a twelve-member commission that studied the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry. The final report was published in 2002 and contained recommendations (for Congress and for the major agencies of the government) that would promote a thriving future of transportation, space exploration, and national security.
In 2004, Tyson was once again appointed by President Bush to serve on a nine-member commission on the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy, dubbed the “Moon, Mars, and Beyond” commission. This group navigated a path by which the new space vision can become a successful part of the American agenda. And in 2006, the head of NASA appointed Tyson to serve on its prestigious Advisory Council, which guides NASA through its perennial need to fit ambitious visions into restricted budgets.
In addition to dozens of professional publications, Dr. Tyson has written, and continues to write for the public. From 1995 to 2005, Tyson was a monthly essayist for Natural History magazine under the title Universe. And among Tyson’s fifteen books is his memoir The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist; and Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-written with Donald Goldsmith. Origins is the companion book to the PBS NOVA four-part mini-series Origins, in which Tyson served as on-camera host. The program premiered in September 2004.
Two of Tyson’s other books are the playful and informative Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, which was a New York Times bestseller, and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, chronicling his experience at the center of the controversy over Pluto’s planetary status. The PBS NOVA documentary The Pluto Files, based on the book, premiered in March 2010.
In February 2012, Tyson released his tenth book, containing every thought he has ever had on the past, present, and future of space exploration: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.
For five seasons, beginning in the fall of 2006, Tyson appeared as the on-camera host of PBS NOVA’s spinoff program NOVA ScienceNOW, which is an accessible look at the frontier of all the science that shapes the understanding of our place in the universe.
During the summer of 2009 Tyson identified a cadre of professional standup comedians to assist his effort in bringing science to commercial radio with the NSF-funded pilot program StarTalk. Now also a popular Podcast, for three years it enjoyed a limited-run Television Series on the National Geographic Channel. StarTalk combines celebrity guests with informative yet playful banter. The target audience is all those people who never thought they would, or could, like science. In its first year on television and in three successive seasons, it was nominated for a Best Informational Programming Emmy.
Tyson is the recipient of twenty-one honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by NASA to a non-government citizen. His contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid “13123 Tyson.” And by zoologists, with the naming of Indirani Tysoni, a native species of leaping frog in India. On the lighter side, Tyson was voted “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive” by People Magazine in 2000.
More recently, Tyson published Astrophysics for People In A Hurry in 2017, which was a domestic and international bestseller. This adorably readable book is an introduction to all that you’ve read and heard about that’s making news in the universe—consummated, in one place, succinctly presented, for people in a hurry.
That was followed in 2018 by Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, coauthored with Avis Lang, in 2019 by Letters from an Astrophysicist, both New York Times Bestsellers, and in 2021 by Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We are Going, coauthored with James Trefil.
Tyson served as Executive Science Editor and on-camera Host & Narrator for Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, the 21st century continuation of Carl Sagan’s landmark television series. The show began in March 2014 and ran thirteen episodes in primetime on the FOX network, and appeared in 181 countries in 45 languages around the world on the National Geographic Channels. Cosmos won four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, two Critics Choice awards, as well as a dozen other industry recognitions. Tyson reprised his role as on-camera host for the next season of Cosmos—Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which premiered on the National Geographic Channel in March 2020 and on the FOX network in September 2020.
Tyson is the fifth head of the world-renowned Hayden Planetarium in New York City and the first occupant of its Frederick P. Rose Directorship. He is also a research associate of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.
Neil deGrasse Tyson lives in New York City with his wife, a former IT project manager with Bloomberg Financial Markets. | |
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