American Philosophical Society
Member History

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21Name:  Dr. Stephen J. Lippard
 Institution:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1940
   
 
Stephen J. Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and studied at Haverford College (B.A. in Chemistry) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry). After a postdoctoral year at MIT during 1965-66, he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he served until moving to MIT in 1983. His research activities span the fields of inorganic chemistry, biological chemistry, and neurochemistry. Included are studies to understand and improve platinum anticancer drugs, the synthesis of dimetallic complexes as models for non-heme iron metalloenzymes, structural and mechanistic investigations of methane monooxygenase and related bacterial multicomponent monooxygenases, and inorganic neurotransmitters, especially nitric oxide and zinc. He has published 900 papers on these and other topics and has co-authored a popular textbook with Jeremy Berg entitled "Principles of Bioinorganic Chemistry." He supervised the Ph. D. thesis research of 115 graduate students and more than that number of postdoctoral associates, many of whom hold significant positions in academic, industrial, or government institutions or in the medical or legal professions. His honors include the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, National Medal of Science, the Priestley Medal (highest award bestowed by the American Chemical Society), the Centenary Medal awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK, the Pauling Medal, the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award from MIT, awarded to one member of the faculty each year, the F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research, Luigi Sacconi Medal from the Italian Chemical Society, co-recipient of the first Christopher J. Fredrickson Prize for Research in the Neurobiology of Zinc, ACS Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, and election to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Irish Academy, Italian Chemical Society, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He holds several honorary degrees. His research on platinum complexes led to the co-founding of Blend Therapeutics in 2011. Based in Watertown, Massachusetts, Blend (now Placon Therapeutics) has recently had an IND approved by the FDA to take a new platinum compound into a Phase I clinical trial for cancer treatment.
 
22Name:  Dr. Michael A. Marletta
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1951
   
 
Michael A. Marletta is on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds the CH and Annie Li Chair in the Molecular Biology of Diseases. He is also Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley. Marletta is a biochemist whose creative work begins with a dissection of a biological question into a molecular framework for study. His primary research interests lie at the interface of chemistry and biology with emphasis on the study of protein function and enzyme reaction mechanisms. His work has demonstrated uncommon creativity and led to remarkable discoveries when asking chemical questions about complex biological phenomena. His work on the enzymes nitric oxide synthase and guanylate cyclase provided many of the fundamental details of nitric oxide signaling that have now become a paradigm for cellular communication involving gases. He has also discovered novel enzymes involved in biomass degradation that also play a role in pathogenesis in humans and plants. Marletta has been recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship (1995), election to the National Academy of Medicine (1999), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), and the National Academy of Sciences (2006). He has received many awards that recognize his accomplishments including the Harrison Howe Award (2004), the Repligen Award for Chemistry of Biological Processes given by the Biological Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (2007), the Emil T. Kaiser Award from the Protein Society (2007), the Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest, Northeastern Section, American Chemical Society (2007), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities AASCU Distinguished Alumnus Award (2014), the Alfred Bader Award for Bioinorganic/Bioorganic Chemistry (2015), and the UCSF 150th Anniversary Alumni Excellence Award (2015). Marletta serves on editorial boards including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and is a member of the Foundation Board at Fredonia, State University of New York. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
 
23Name:  Ms. Jane Mayer
 Institution:  The New Yorker Magazine
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
 Subdivision:  502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1955
   
 
Jane Mayer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in March 1995. Based in Washington, DC, she writes about politics, culture and national security for the magazine. Before joining The New Yorker, Mayer was for twelve years a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In 1984 she became the Journal's first female White House correspondent. She was also a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent for the paper. Among other stories, she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the final days of Communism in the Soviet Union. Mayer was the 2008 winner of the John Chancellor Award for Journalistic Excellence, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 2008, and winner in 2009 of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard, the 2009 Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University, the 2009 Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library's 2009 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia, the 2009 Sidney Hillman Award, the 2009 Ambassador Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. She was also a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been a finalist three times for the National Magazine award, and was nominated twice by the Journal for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, she was the winner of the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Obama Administration's prosecution of national security whistle blowers, and the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism. In 2012 she was awarded the Toner Prize for political reporting. She was also the 2013 winner of the IF Stone "Izzy" award presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. In 2014, Mayer was winner of the Matrix Award, given by the New York Women in Communications. Before joining the Journal in 1982, Mayer worked as a metropolitan reporter for the Washington Star. She began her career in journalism as a stringer for Time magazine while still a student in college. Mayer is the author of the 2016 book "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right," and the 2008 book "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War in Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," which was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times, the Economist Magazine, Salon, Slate and Bloomberg. In 2010 the NYU Journalism School named it one of the ten most important works of journalism of the decade. She was also the co-author of two additional best-selling books. "Strange Justice," written with Jill Abramson, published in 1994, was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction. Her first book, "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988," co-authored by Doyle McManus, was an acclaimed account of the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan Administration. In 2009, Mayer was chosen Princeton University's Ferris Professor of the Humanities, teaching an undergraduate seminar on political reporting. She has been a speaker at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Mount Holyoke, Northwestern, Boston College and Grinnell, among other schools. Mayer, who was born in New York, graduated with honors from Yale in 1977 and continued her studies in history at Oxford. She lives in Washington with her husband, Bill Hamilton, and daughter, Kate.
 
24Name:  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.
 
25Name:  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.
 
26Name:  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.
 
27Name:  Dr. Christopher John Pethick
 Institution:  Nordita; Niels Bohr International Academy
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
Christopher Pethick is a theoretical physicist of remarkable breadth and depth, whose seminal contributions to neutron star, ultracold atomic gas, and condensed matter physics have been recognized by his Onsager Prize for statistical physics and Bethe Prize for theoretical astrophysics. He gave the first consistent description of neutron stars, from their low density crust to their superfluid interior, their behavior during stellar collapse and subsequent cooling, and identified compact X-ray sources as accreting neutron stars. He provided the microscopic basis of our current understanding of liquid helium-3 at nonzero temperature, showed how related ideas could be used to understand the transport properties of heavy-fermion materials, and in a very different context, quark matter at high densities. Recently he has bridged the gap between atomic and condensed-matter physics by his imaginative application of condensed matter concepts to ultracold atomic gases. His major influence on Scandinavian science has been recognized by his election to the Royal Danish and Norwegian Academies of Sciences and Letters.
 
28Name:  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.
 
29Name:  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.
 
30Name:  Dame Marilyn Strathern
 Institution:  University of Cambridge
 Year Elected:  2016
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  407. Philosophy
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1941
   
 
Marilyn Strathern describes herself as a conventional social anthropologist. A product of the Cambridge School of Social Anthropology at its heyday in the 1960s, she carried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, her texts reflecting issues largely within the discipline rather than outside it (Mary Douglas once called her -- not altogether flatteringly -- ‘an anthropologist’s anthropologist’). These days she has an interdisciplinary audience. Strathern’s interests have been fairly consistently divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. She is probably most well known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she herself pairs with After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century (1992), a comment on the cultural revolution at home. Her most experimental work is an exercise on the comparative method called Partial connections (1991). Projects over the last twenty five years are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property rights and interdisciplinarity, although it is her brief work on regimes of audit and accountability that has attracted most widespread attention. Some of these themes are brought together in Kinship, law and the unexpected (2005). Papua New Guinea is never far from her concerns, her most recent visit to Mt Hagen being in 2015. Her first departmental position was at the University of Manchester, UK. Now an emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Strathern retired from the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology in 2008 and from being head of Cambridge’s Girton College in 2009. A fellow of the British Academy since 1987, she received a national honour (DBE) in 2001, and is currently (hon.) Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth.
 
31Name:  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.
 
32Name:  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.
 
33Name:  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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