APS Member History

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21	Name:	Dr. Sara McLanahan
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1941
	Death Date:	December 31,2021

	A specialist in family demography, inequality, and social policy, Sara McLanahan’s research has shaped our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of changing family structures. She has focused on the role of the family in the reproduction of poverty. Her 1994 book, Growing Up with a Single Parent, was the first major study using national data to examine the effects of divorce for children’s well-being. McLanahan created the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a nationally representative longitudinal birth cohort study of about 5,000 families. In addition to a series of important findings about the lives of unmarried parents and their children, the study’s data have been used by scholars from multiple disciplines to analyze different issues pertaining to disadvantaged populations. McLanahan is currently investigating how the interplay between genetic markers and family environments shapes child development. She is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Emeritus and Founding Director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019). Sarah McLanahan was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016.

22	Name:	Dr. Alexander Nehamas
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	406. Linguistics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1946

	Nehamas writes beautifully on a wide range of topics from the most technical issues in ancient philosophy and the philosophy of Nietzsche to questions about painting, poetry, television, and friendship that speak to both the professional philosopher and the educated lay reader. He combines a scrupulous attention to philology and textual criticism with a rare capacity to address the kinds of big questions about what it is to live a virtuous life that have engaged the best of the western philosophical tradition since Plato. His Gifford Lectures, now expanded into a forthcoming book on friendship, are in the tradition of James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (the first Gifford lectures), in that both address the most fundamental of human interests. Nehamas has been widely recognized for his distinction.

23	Name:	Ms. Joyce Carol Oates
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
	Subdivision:	501. Creative Artists
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1938

	Joyce Carol Oates is a leading American woman of letters. As a prolific and elegant writer of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry for over five decades, to the delight and astonishment of readers and critics, she probes a vast range of contemporary issues and themes including poverty, race relations, crime and violence, childhood and adolescence, love, sexuality and the roles of women, the movie industry, the boxing industry, the American city and suburb, and the American university. She has authored sympathetic and satiric fictionalized versions of public figures as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, Ted Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson, and as an erudite critic she has written brilliantly of, for example, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Simone Weil. She is the author of story collections Beautiful Days [2018] and Night-Gaunts [2018]. Her services to literature include co-editing The Ontario Review with her former husband Ray Smith, frequent reviews for The New York Review of Books and other journals, and mentoring a whole generation of younger writers fortunate enough to have been her students at Princeton University where she has been a professor since 1978. Her awards include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Humanities Medal.

24	Name:	Dr. Rogers M. Smith
	Institution:	University of Pennsylvania
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	304. Jurisprudence and Political Science
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1953

	A leading scholar of American Public Law and the politics of membership, Rogers Smith’s work proceeds on both normative and empirical tracks. His early normative scholarship defended a liberal jurisprudence, spelling out its implications for U.S. Supreme Court decisions and American constitutional purposes. His empirical work documented competing visions of citizenship in U.S. history, culminating in his widely acclaimed Civic Ideals. This work details the liberal and republican traditions more richly than had hitherto been attempted, but also excavates long neglected traditions that cleave to various nativist, religious, racially supremacist, and other exclusionary ideologies. It recast debates about American exceptionalism and provided the impetus for Smith’s subsequent normative scholarship. In that work he has argued that political communities and political statuses should be reformed so as to be more inclusive, in the course of which he has made extensive contributions to the literatures on affirmative action, immigration, and minority representation.

25	Name:	Dr. Allan Spradling
	Institution:	Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Carnegie Institution for Science
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	202. Cellular and Developmental Biology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1949

	Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan Allan Spradling studied mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Switching to biology at MIT, where he earned his PhD. in 1975, Spradling used Drosophila polytene chromosomes as genome arrays to study transcription, and found that heat shock causes a universal genetic response. Spradling began a long fascination with the ovary during a postdoctoral stint at Indiana University, where he discovered that Drosophila eggshell genes undergo amplification during follicle development. In 1980 he joined the faculty at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, and two years later he and colleague Gerry Rubin showed how transposable elements can be used to introduce DNA into the . Unlike contemporary transformation methods in other animals, Drosophila genes introduced in transposons functioned normally, allowing cognate genetic defects to be cured and developmental gene regulation to be studied. Remaining at Carnegie, Spradling was appointed an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1988, and Director in 1994. Spradling’s group developed methods for using single transposon insertions to isolate and manipulate Drosophila genes. These efforts initiated the Drosophila Gene Disruption Project, whose freely distributed strains have facilitated Drosophila research worldwide. The basic biological and genetic mechanisms that make multicellular animals possible are turning out to be largely the same in all species. Studying model organisms lays the groundwork for deciphering how mammalian cells and tissues develop and operate. For example, Spradling’s group analyzed the basic biology of tissue stem cells, and in 2000 characterized the first stem cell niche. Recently, his lab showed that mammalian oocytes are constructed like Drosophila oocytes, using materials transported from sister germ cells, which thereby act as "nurse cells." Indeed, egg production from beginning to end is turning out to be much more highly conserved than originally anticipated. A member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since 1989, and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 1991, Spradling has been awarded many prizes for his work. These include the NAS Molecular Biology Award (jointly with Gerry Rubin). He also received the E.J. Conklin Award of the Society for Developmental Biology and the G.W. Beadle Award of the Genetics Society of America. Spradling also received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was the 2008 winner of the Gruber Prize in Genetics.

26	Name:	Dr. Alar Toomre
	Institution:	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	101. Astronomy
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1937

	Alar Toomre has been a true pioneer with his elegant and prescient studies, starting more than 40 years ago, of the evolution of the structure of galaxies. He introduced to these studies numerical simulations at a time when very clever approaches were needed to obtain useful results, due to the limitations of computer capabilities in that era. He also developed the deep stability criterion, the so-called Q criterion, for differentially rotating stellar disks. He was, in addition, the first to suggest and demonstrate that elliptical galaxies result from collisions of spiral galaxies. His early studies of galactic mergers were spectacular achievements. Overall, Toomre’s work has had a profound influence on the understanding of galactic dynamics and has largely set the direction of research in this now very vigorous and active field. Finally he made some substantial contributions to our understanding of the motions of the Earth about its center of mass. Among other awards, Toomre was awarded the 2014 Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society in recognition of his beautiful and prescient numerical simulations over 40 years ago of the interactions of galaxies ("Galactic Bridges and Tails," carried out with his brother, Juri), and for his development a half century ago of the key local stability criterion (the "Q" criterion) for differentially rotating disks in galaxies.

27	Name:	Dr. Richard White
	Institution:	Stanford University
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1947

	I was born in New York City, and grew up in and around Los Angeles. I attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington. I am an accidental historian inspired by my involvement in Indian fishing rights controversies in Washington in the late 1960s. One thing led to another, and my interest in Native American and Western history led me to environmental history. I have more recently become interested in memory and history and in political economy. I find it hard to specialize, and equally hard to stay within my own discipline. Maybe I just have a short attention span. I have also found it hard to stay in one place. I have taught at Michigan State, the University of Utah, the University of Washington, and Stanford University, where I have remained largely because the university has treated me well and my wife became a born-again Californian. She has no intention of leaving. I have always been interested in the techniques of writing history and the crafting of narratives; after receiving a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, I used the grant to co-found the Spatial History Project at Stanford and became fascinated by digital visualizations as a way to analyze and present historical data. This, in turn, has increased my interest in photography. Although I am primarily a historian of the United States, I have written about Mexico, Canada, and France as well as Ireland. I also have an interest in New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific World but this has not, so far, led to publications.

28	Name:	Dr. Irene J. Winter
	Institution:	Harvard University
	Year Elected:	2016
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	401. Archaeology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1940

	Born in New York City, Irene Winter received her AB in Anthropology from Barnard College (1960), her MA in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago (1967), and her PhD from Columbia University in the History of Art and Archaeology (1973). She taught at Queens College, CUNY, from 1971-1976, at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976-1988, and is presently Boardman Professor of Fine Arts Emerita at Harvard University, having served on the faculty from 1988 to 2009, and as Department Chair from 1993-1996. In 1996-97 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge University, delivering the Slade Lectures in the Spring of 1997. She subsequently delivered the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1999, and in the Spring of 2005 presented the Andrew H. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Professor Winter has participated in archaeological excavations at Godin Tepe and Hasanlu, Iran, and at Tell Sakhariyeh, Iraq, with additional comparative fieldwork in India. Her awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship (1983-88), along with an Olivia James travel Grant of the Archaeological Institute of America, and a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1999, was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2003-04, was named a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, in 2005, received the Medal of Distinction from Barnard College in 2009, and was designated an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2013. She has served on the Board of the College Art Association, several editorial and grants boards, and the Scientific Committee of the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East since its inception in 1988. She has also been a member of the Iraq Task Force of the Archaeological Institute of America. Her principal work has been devoted to the art and archaeology of the Ancient Near East, writing on topics ranging from ivory carving and cylinder seals to royal sculpture. Throughout her career, her stress has been on the relationship between the visual arts, language, history and culture in an attempt to join empirical data with theory in an inter-disciplinary context. Two volumes of collected essays, published by Brill, appeared in 2010, entitled On Art in the Ancient Near East. The Mellon lectures will be published as Visual Affect: Aesthetic Experience and Ancient Mesopotamia.

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