American Philosophical Society
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21Name:  Dr. Daniel Mendelsohn
 Institution:  Bard College
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
 Subdivision:  501. Creative Artists
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning author, journalist, and critic, was born in New York City in 1960 and received his B.A. summa cum laude in Classics from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. After completing his Ph.D. in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Esquire, and The Paris Review. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York Magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism in 2001. Since 2000, he has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books; for his theater reviews in the latter, he was awarded the 2002 George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. His book reviews and essays on literary topics appear as well in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, and he also writes about travel for Travel + Leisure. His work has been widely anthologized in collections including The Best American Travel Writing, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca, and - for "Republicans Can Be Cured!", his satirical New York Times Op-Ed piece about the discovery of a gene for political conservatism - Best American Humor. In addition to his other awards, Mr. Mendelsohn is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Daniel Mendelsohn's 1999 memoir of sexual identity and family history, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. His scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, was published in October 2002 by Oxford University Press, and appeared in February 2005 in paperback. His book The Lost: A Search for Six Million, the story of his search to learn about the fates of family members who perished in the Holocaust, was awarded the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and France's Prix Medicis, among many other prizes. In August 2008 a collection of his literary and critical essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, was published by Harper Collins. Spring of 2009 saw the publication of his new translations, with commentary, of the Complete Works of C.P. Cavafy, and of Cavafy's Unfinished Poems (Knopf). Waiting for the Barbarians (2012) was a finalist for the NBCC award in criticism and the PEN Art of the Essay prize. In 2014 he was awarded the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2020 he published Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.
 
22Name:  Dr. Thomas Nagel
 Institution:  New York University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  406. Linguistics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1937
   
 
Thomas Nagel was born in Yugoslavia in 1937. After earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963, he served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and New York University, where he is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law and University Professor. He was awarded the Balzan Prize for Moral Philosophy in 2008. Among his writings in philosophy of mind, Dr. Nagel's 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?" defended an antireductionist position about the problem of consciousness. He is one of the half dozen most respected moral philosophers in the world. While defending the possibility of objective reasoning about value, he has never ignored the role of subjective reasons, and, with the late Bernard Williams, he pioneered the discussion of "moral luck." He is simultaneously a humanistic and an analytic philosopher, and he shows that there is no contradiction involved in being both.
 
23Name:  Dr. John F. Nash
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  104. Mathematics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1928
 Death Date:  May 23, 2015
   
 
John Nash introduced what is now called "Nash equilibrium" in non-cooperative games and proved that such an equilibrium always exists. This work is foundational for Game Theory and led to his Nobel Prize in Economics. No less impressive is his work in pure mathematics, where his very deep and difficult theorems on embedding of manifolds initiated a whole new field of research. Tragically disabled by schizophrenia for over 30 years, he provided inspiration for many fellow sufferers by completely recovering, as told in the book and motion picture A Beautiful Mind. He then resumed his research in mathematics, having served as a researcher at Princeton University from 1994 to his death in 2015. In addition to the Nobel Prize, among Dr. Nash's many honors are the John Von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (1978), the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize (1999), and Norway's Abel Prize (2015). A graduate of Princeton University (Ph.D., 1950), he is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995) and the National Academy of Sciences (1996). He died May 23, 2015, at the age of 86 in New Jersey.
 
24Name:  Dr. Elinor Ostrom
 Institution:  Indiana University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  304. Jurisprudence and Political Science
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1933
 Death Date:  June 12, 2012
   
 
Elinor Ostrom's pioneering scholarship, for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, provided a compelling framework for understanding collective action, resource management, property rights, and institutional design. Her work reached across disciplinary lines to deal with some of society's most vexing social problems - poverty, inequality, and sustainability - combining game theory, laboratory experimentation, field study, and institutional analysis. Her seminal publication, Governing the Commons, notes that rational choice theory predicts that without external intervention people will over-use common pool resources (CPRs) such as fisheries or irrigation water. In fact, many communities manage their commonly shared resources collectively. Through field research from Nepal to Mexico to Los Angeles, she explored successful and unsuccessful CPR institutions, offering a theory of institutional choice that has fundamentally changed how social scientists think about collective action, institutional choice and self-governance. This work shows how people can resolve dilemmas of collective action without external coercion. Scientifically, she triggered a productive dialogue between formal theorists and empirical field researchers, and she applied her analytical approach to an ever-wider set of immediate practical problems and human experiences around the globe. From 1973 to 2009 Dr. Ostrom was the Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, then served as the Senior Research Director until her death. Additionally, she had been the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University since 1973. She recevied a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (1965). In 2010 she was awarded the University Medal from Indiana University and the rank of Distinguished Professor. Elinor Ostrom died on June 12, 2012, at the age of 78, in Bloomington, Indiana.
 
25Name:  Dr. Stephen Owen
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1946
   
 
Stephen Owen is widely viewed as the most important scholar-critic of Chinese literature in the West. He is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he was the first specialist in his field to be made a University Professor at Harvard. At a time when understanding China is a major priority for the United States, Dr. Owen has, in a long series of distinguished books and articles, opened the door for Westerners to a new understanding of Chinese literature and culture. Though his specialty is the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), he has impressive mastery of the range of Chinese literature over its 2,500 years. His work has been informed by recent Western work in literary theory and by a comparatist perspective. He has paid attention in new ways to Chinese literary theory, for example in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. His work shows a remarkable combination of learning, literary sensitivity, and elegance of style, as in the admirable readings of Chinese poetry in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. His magisterial An Anthology of Chinese Literature is an amazing poetic and scholarly accomplishment; almost all of the translations are by Dr. Owen himself, and they bring the translation of Chinese poetry, stories, plays, and essays to a new level of lucidity and literary distinction. His translations and annotations show how Chinese poetry is a genuine tradition, for example in its subtle use, in later poems, of allusions to earlier poems. Though his books are written in English and primarily for Western readers, they have such general importance that many of them have been translated into Chinese and published in China. He has a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Without a doubt Dr. Owen has brought Chinese literature within the domain of the comparative study of literature.
 
26Name:  Dr. David W. Packard
 Institution:  Packard Humanities Institute; Stanford Theatre Foundation
 Year Elected:  2006
 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:  1940
   
 
In 1985, David Packard developed the Ibycus Scholarly Computer, which was fully custom hardware and software and included a high-speed hardware "search engine." The machine was designed to read (and search) a CD-ROM containing large quantities of ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Nearly 300 of these were sold to universities and individual scholars to support teaching and research in these languages; many are still in use today. In 1987, he founded the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), one of the five largest foundations supporting the humanities in the nation, with the purpose of supporting the use of technology in the humanities. Most early PHI projects involved the creation of databases of historic texts, from Greek Epigraphy to Benjamin Franklin. In 1999, PHI expanded to include archaeology, music, film preservation, and education. In archaeology, PHI organized and funded a major conservation program at Herculaneum in Italy, an international archaeological initiative in Albania, and an emergency rescue excavation at Zeugma in Turkey, including the conservation of dozens of Roman mosaics. In music, PHI organized and funded a new scholarly edition of the complete works of CPE Bach and is collaborating with the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg to transform their definitive New Mozart Edition into a fully digital scholarly edition that can be kept up-to-date and will be freely available on the internet. In film preservation, PHI is building a new conservation center for the Library of Congress to house the Library's enormous collection of film, television, and recorded sound. PHI also provides major support for the UCLA Film and Television Archive. David Packard also founded the Stanford Theatre Foundation to renovate and operate the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto which for sixteen years has shown classic Hollywood films, all selected by Packard.
 
27Name:  Dr. Henry Petroski
 Institution:  Duke University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  103. Engineering
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1942
 Death Date:  June 14, 2023
   
 
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He is a graduate of Manhattan College, having earned his B.M.E. degree in 1963, and of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics in 1968. Before joining the Duke faculty in 1980, he taught at the University of Texas, Austin and served on the professional staff of Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Petroski, who has been called "the poet laureate of technology," has written broadly on the topics of design, success and failure, and the history of engineering and technology. His books on these subjects, which are intended for professional engineers, students, and general readers alike, include To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, which in 1987 was adapted for a BBC-television documentary; Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering, which was named by the Association of American Publishers as the best general engineering book published in 1994; and Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design, which was based on his 2004 Louis Clark Vanuxem Lectures at Princeton University. His Engineers of Dreams is a history of American bridge building. He has also written on commonplace objects in The Pencil; The Evolution of Useful Things; The Book on the Bookshelf; Small Things Considered; and The Toothpick, and has published collections of essays on engineering subjects under the titles Remaking the World and Pushing the Limits. His memoir about delivering newspapers in the 1950s and about what predisposed him to become an engineer is entitled Paperboy. Since 1991, he has written the engineering column in the bimonthly magazine American Scientist, and he also writes a column on the engineering profession for ASEE Prism. He is a professional engineer licensed in Texas and a chartered engineer registered in Ireland. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. Among his other honors are the Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers, the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose history and heritage committee he now chairs. He holds honorary degrees from Clarkson University, Manhattan College, Trinity College (in Hartford, Conn.), and Valparaiso University, and has received distinguished engineering alumnus awards from Manhattan College and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is an honorary member of the Moles and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006.
 
28Name:  Dr. V. Ramanathan
 Institution:  Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  105. Physical Earth Sciences
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1944
   
 
V. (Ram) Ramanathan is the Victor C. Alderson Professor of Applied Ocean Sciences & Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of California, San Diego, where he also directs the Center for Atmospheric Sciences. He is the Chairman of the UNEP sponsored Atmospheric Brown Cloud Project and was the co-chief scientist for the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), which led to the discovery of the South Asian brown haze. Dr. Ramanathan has made fundamental contributions to our modern understanding of global climate change and human impacts on climate and environment. He is widely recognized for establishing the impacts of non-CO2 trace gases in climate, particularly the contributions of chlorofluorocarbons as well as tropospheric and stratospheric ozone and for his research in understanding the effects of water vapor, clouds and aerosols in global climate change. More recently he demonstrated that soot can play an unexpectedly large role in global dimming. His work on the trace gas greenhouse effect linked chemistry in a fundamental way to climate, while his work on the radiative effects of tropospheric ozone and soot linked air pollution strongly with global warming. He was the first to demonstrate in 1975 that CFCs are major greenhouse gases and that adding one molecule of CFC to the atmosphere has the same greenhouse effect of adding more than 10,000 molecules of CO2. He then led a WMO study which concluded that numerous trace gases are significant contributors to global warming. He followed this up by predicting (with Madden) in 1980 that the global warming would be detectable by 2000, which was subsequently verified in 2001. He led innovative efforts to distinguish the effects of infrared absorption and reflection both by clouds and clear skies using global satellite data, and thereby provided new observational constraints on the influence of clouds in the Earth's energy budget. He also used the satellite data to show that water vapor greenhouse effect was a major amplifier of global warming. With Pitcher, et al., he played a key role in developing the first community climate model, now the major American climate simulation research model. During the 1990s, he designed and conducted two international field experiments, the Central Equatorial Pacific experiment with J. Kuettner and the Indian Ocean experiment with P. J. Crutzen. With INDOEX scientists from the U.S., Europe and India, he showed that black carbon and other aerosols in the widespread South Asian brown haze led to a large reduction of solar radiation reaching the surface (dimming) and increased solar heating of atmosphere with significant impacts on regional climate and monsoon rainfall. He is now studying the effects of Atmospheric Brown Clouds over Asia, including their effects on water and regional climate. For this purpose he is developing an observing system with light weight and long range unmanned aircraft vehicles with miniaturized instruments. He has received numerous honors including: the Buys Ballot Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences given once every decade; the VOLVO environmental prize for pioneering work related to the greenhouse effect; the Rossby Medal which is the highest award given by the American Meteorological Society; induction into the National Academy of Sciences in April 2003; election by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004; the 2018 Mendel Medal from Villanova University; and the 2021 Blue Planet Prize of Japan's Asahi Glass Foundation. He has served on numerous national and international committees and has given expert testimonies in the U.S. Congress. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006.
 
29Name:  Dr. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
 Institution:  City University of New York Graduate Center
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402. Criticism: Arts and Letters
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1950
 Death Date:  April 12, 2009
   
 
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of the most influential figures in gender studies, and more specifically in the burgeoning area of queer theory; indeed, she was a major founder of the field. Her first book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, has been extensively cited and used by feminist critics and queer theorists alike. Not long after, her second crucial work, Epistemology of the Closet, had a similarly powerful impact on the increasingly complex field of gender studies and earned an honorable mention from the committee awarding the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize. Tendencies, a collection of essays, further extended both the literary and the cultural insights that Dr. Sedgwick brilliantly formulated in her first two books, while Dialogue on Love, published in the same year, is an ambitiously introspective memoir recounting the author's struggle with breast cancer along with her quest to comprehend her own sexuality in contexts she herself has significantly investigated in her key contributions to cultural studies. A poet as well as a critic, Dr. Sedgwick also published a volume of verse, Fat Art, Thin Art, and most recently Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, a series of essays expanding her work on queer theory and her analyses of the experience of illness into discussions of current theoretical perspectives on pedagogy and performativity. Dr. Sedgwick also edited several collections of essays, including Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (coedited with Adam Frank, 1995), a selection of key works by the radical psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), a series of works reexamining the history of the novel using the framework of queer theory that she has herself so powerfully established. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York. She also taught at Hamilton College, Boston University, Amherst College, Dartmouth College and Duke University. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1975. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on April 12, 2009, in New York, NY, at the age of 58.
 
30Name:  Dr. Theda Skocpol
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  304. Jurisprudence and Political Science
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1947
   
 
Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology and formerly Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She also served as Director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard from1999 to 2006. Dr. Skocpol received her B.A. in 1969 from Michigan State University and her Ph.D. in 1975 from Harvard University. In 1996, she served as President of the Social Science History Association, an interdisciplinary professional group; and from 2001-03 she served as President-Elect and then President of the 14,000-member American Political Science Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has been awarded honorary degrees by Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and Amherst College. The author of nine books, nine edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles, Dr. Skocpol is recognized as one of the most cited and widely influential scholars in the modern social sciences; her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, U.S. history, and the study of public policy. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. A leader in historical-institutional and comparative research, Dr. Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). For the past fifteen years, Dr. Skocpol's research has focused on U.S. politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), won five scholarly awards: the J. David Greenstone Award of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association; the Outstanding Book Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, given annually for "the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs"; the 1993 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association; and the 1993 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa, given to honor "a comprehensive study that contributes significantly to historical, philosophical, or religious interpretations of the human condition." Dr. Skocpol's recent books include Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government (1996); Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003, winner of the 2004 Greenstone Award); Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, 2005), What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (with Ariane Liazos and Marshall Ganz, 2007), and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (with Vanessa Williamson, 2012). Active in civic as well as academic life, Dr. Skocpol was included in policy discussions with President Bill Clinton at the White House and Camp David. She writes both for scholarly outlets and for publications appealing to the educated public. Married since 1967 to Bill Skocpol, an experimental physicist who teaches at Boston University, Theda Skocpol is the proud mother of Michael Allan Skocpol, born in 1988.
 
31Name:  Dr. Stephen M. Stigler
 Institution:  University of Chicago
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  303. History Since 1715
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1941
   
 
A rare combination of the scientist and the humanist, Stephen Stigler has served as Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago since 1992. An outstanding statistician, he has explored the development of statistical method on a broad scale with fastidious research, from mathematical theory (including asymptotic distribution theory for robust estimators) to applications in the social, physical, and biological sciences. At the University of Chicago he has taught a course on the history of statistics, and he has conducted research on early American lotteries in the American Philosophical Society Library. For the National Research Council he evaluated the use of DNA in forensic science. He is also a very accomplished historian. His History of Statistics does an excellent job of placing statisticians and their contributions in proper context while mounting a penetrating account of developments in probability oriented statistics before 1900. His Statistics on the Table is a collection drawn from the more than one hundred essays he has published, sparking debate on numerous statistical topics in a sparkling and witty style. Dr. Stigler has also served the profession more broadly as president of the International Statistical Institute, president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1967) and has been elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
 
32Name:  Dr. Horst L. Stormer
 Institution:  Columbia University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1949
   
 
Horst Störmer has been the foremost leader in the study of the properties of electrons moving in thin layers fabricated for electronic and optical devices. His work was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1998 for the discovery of the Fractional Quantum Hall effect which is understood to be a completely new state of matter. Energetic and charismatic, Dr. Störmer has been a true leader, training many graduate and postdoctoral students who have gone on to establish major programs at our best universities. He is currently Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and the founding Scientific Director of the Nanotechnology Institute at Columbia University, a highly successful academic enterprise, and he has also been affiliated with research departments of Bell Laboratories/ Lucent Technologies since 1977. A native of Germany, Dr. Störmer earned his Ph.D. from Stuttgart University (1977). He has been honored with the American Physical Society's Buckley Award (1984), the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal (1998) and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1992) and the National Academy of Sciences (1998).
 
33Name:  Dr. Lubert Stryer
 Institution:  Stanford University School of Medicine
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1938
   
 
Lubert Stryer is Winzer Professor of Cell Biology Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology of the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his B.S. degree in 1957 from the University of Chicago and his M.D. degree in 1961 from Harvard. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and then at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England. In 1964, Dr. Stryer joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford. In 1969, he moved to Yale, and in 1976, returned to Stanford to head a new department. His research over more than four decades has dealt with the interplay of light and life. Dr. Stryer's laboratory discovered the primary stage of amplification in vision and elucidated the G-protein cascade that generates a neural signal in visual excitation. He has developed new fluorescence techniques for studying biomolecules and cells, as exemplified by the use of fluorescence resonance energy transfer as a spectroscopic ruler. Dr. Stryer is the author of four editions of Biochemistry, a textbook widely used throughout the world for more than twenty-five years and translated into more than ten languages. The interface between the academic and industrial worlds has also attracted Dr. Stryer's interest and involvement. He participated in the founding and development of innovative biotechnology companies - as President and Scientific Director of the Affymax Research Institute, Director of Affymetrix, Inc. and chairman of the Board of Senomyx, Inc. At Affymax and Affymetrix, he played a key role in devising novel optical techniques for generating high-density peptide and DNA arrays. He is a co-inventor of the DNA chip, which makes it possible to read vast amounts of genetic information in a massively parallel way. Dr. Stryer has also participated in national educational affairs as a trustee and advisor. He led the "Bio2010 Study" of National Research Council's Committee on Undergraduate Biology Education and was a Director of the McKnight Neurosciences Endowment and a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Stryer was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 1975. His other honors include the National Medal of Science (2006), the American Chemical Society Award in Biological Chemistry (1970), appointment as National Lecturer of the Biophysical Society (1987), Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (1991), the American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb-Cleveland Prize (1991), the Alcon Award in Vision Research (1992), an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Chicago (1992), the Distinguished Inventors Award of the Intellectual Property Owners' Association (1993) and the European Inventor of the Year Award (2006), and the Molecular Bioanalytics Award of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2002).
 
34Name:  Mr. Franklin A. Thomas
 Institution:  Ford Foundation; The Study Group
 Year Elected:  2006
 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:  1934
 Death Date:  December 22, 2021
   
 
Franklin A. Thomas was born in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Franklin K. Lane High School, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Columbia College in 1956 and a degree in law from Columbia University Law School in 1963. From 1956-60 he was a navigator in the United States Air Force, Strategic Air Command. In 1963, Mr. Thomas became an attorney for the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, and in 1964 he was named an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. From 1965-67 he served as Deputy Police Commissioner in Charge of Legal Matters for the New York City Police Department. From 1967-77, Mr. Thomas served as President and CEO of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, one of the nation's first public/private partnerships aimed at the comprehensive development (housing, business development, education, culture and recreation) of one of the nation's largest distressed urban communities. The Restoration Corporation has served as a model for thousands of similarly focused community-based development corporations throughout the U.S. and abroad. Mr. Thomas was Chair of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Study Commission on U.S. Policy Toward South Africa from 1979-81 and later served as a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on South Africa from 1985-87. In June 1979, he was elected President of the Ford Foundation, having joined the Foundation's Board of Trustees in 1977. During the seventeen years that he led the Ford Foundation, its assets quadrupled and he deployed those assets on behalf of social justice and economic freedom across the world. He retired from that position in 1996. The Study Group, which he heads, provides advice to leaders and organizations in the non-profit and governmental sectors in support of equitable human development worldwide. Mr. Thomas is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Award for "Contributions to the Betterment of Urban Life," the John Jay and Alexander Hamilton Awards from Columbia College, and Columbia Law School's James Kent Medal for distinguished professional achievement. He is also the recipient of the 2008 Frederick Douglass Award and of Columbia University's Medal of Excellence. He has been granted honorary degrees from Bank Street College, Columbia University, Fordham University, New School University, Pace University, Pratt University and Yale University. Mr. Thomas is a director/trustee of several corporate and not for profit boards and serves as an advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. From 2001-06 Mr. Thomas was chair of the September 11th Fund, created by the New York City Community Trust and the United Way of New York City in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Fund assisted victims, their families and affected communities.
 
35Name:  Dr. Lonnie G. Thompson
 Institution:  Ohio State University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  105. Physical Earth Sciences
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1948
   
 
Lonnie G. Thompson is one of the world's foremost authorities on paleo-climatology and glaciology. He has led more than 50 expeditions during the last 30 years, conducting ice-core drilling programs in the world's polar regions as well as in tropical and subtropical ice fields. Recently, Dr. Thompson and his team developed lightweight solar-powered drilling equipment for the acquisition of histories from ice fields in the high Andes of Peru and on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The results of these histories, published in more that 180 articles, have contributed greatly toward the understanding of the Earth's past, present and future climate system. Other Thompson-led expeditions have recovered a 460-meter-long ice core, the world's longest from a mountain range (Alaska, 2002); the first tropic ice core (Peru, 1983); and cores containing the entire sequence of the Last Glacial Stage as well as cores dating over 750,000 years in age, the oldest outside the polar regions (Tibet, 1992). Dr. Thompson's research has resulted in major revisions in the field of paleoclimatology, in particular, by demonstrating how tropical regions have undergone significant climate variability, countering an earlier view that higher latitudes dominate climate change. Dr. Thompson has received numerous honors and awards. In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the John and Alice Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2019 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been selected by Time magazine and CNN as one of "America's Best" in science and medicine. His research has been featured in hundreds of publications, including National Geographic and the National Geographic Adventure magazines. He and his team are the subject of a new book entitled: Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains by Mark Bowen published in late 2005. In 2006, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and was also chosen to receive the Roy Chapman Andrews Society 2007 Distinguished Explorer Award. He has received the nation's highest honor in science, the 2005 National Medal of Science, and the 2012 Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute. Lonnie Thompson was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2006.
 
36Name:  Mr. Robert Venturi
 Institution:  Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.
 Year Elected:  2006
 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? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1925
 Death Date:  September 18, 2018
   
 
Robert Venturi, founding principal of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA), derived his reputation from both his architecture and theoretical and critical writings. In his most recent book, written with Denise Scott Brown, its publisher, Harvard University Press, refers to Mr. Venturi and Ms. Scott Brown's contributions as "(having) influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century." Mr. Venturi's work includes a provincial capitol building of the Haute-Garonne in Toulouse, France; the Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri resort hotel near Nikko, Japan; the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London; additions to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Seattle Art Museum; conceptual design of two high-rise offices in Shanghai; major expansions to Lehigh Valley Hospital; an extension to the Woodmere Art Museum; and a chapel for the Episcopal Academy near Philadelphia. VSBA has engaged in over 70 projects for over 30 institutions of higher learning, many involving repeat work, including labs for the University of Kentucky, Princeton, Penn, Michigan, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Yale; libraries at Dartmouth, Penn, Bard, and Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks; and campus centers for Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, Delaware, Harvard, and Swarthmore. VSBA's architecture and planning are known for particular responsiveness to the client's program, schedule, and budget and to the building's context, accommodating a distinctive aesthetic for each project. Mr. Venturi's teaching, lecturing, and writing received widespread attention and critical review. "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" (Museum of Modern Art Press, 1966) has been translated and published in 18 languages, including a Samizdat edition in Czechoslovakian. It was honored with the AIA's Classic Book Award. Mr. Venturi's awards also included the Anne d'Harnoncourt Award for Artistic Excellence from the Arts & Business Council of Philadelphia (with Denise Scott Brown, 2010), the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1991) and the Presidential Medal of the Arts (1992). He, with Denise Scott Brown, was awarded the 2016 AIA Gold Medal. Robert Venturi died died September 18, 2018 in Philadelphia at the age of 93.
 
37Name:  Dr. Inder M. Verma
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  209. Neurobiology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1947
   
 
Inder Verma has made many sustained contributions to biological sciences in the last 30 years. In 1972, while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Verma carried out the first complementary DNA (cDNA) synthesis to eukaryotic messenger RNA using reverse transcriptase, which is one of the basic tenets of modern biotechnology. Starting in 1974 at The Salk Institute, Dr. Verma characterized the biochemical properties of the seminal enzyme, reverse transcriptase - a set of studies that are now in biology textbooks. In early 1980, Dr. Verma's laboratory began to study the molecular architecture of RNA tumor viruses. His laboratory determined the complete nucleotide sequence of the first transforming virus and identified the transforming gene. More importantly the sequence revealed the molecular mechanism of how normal cellular sequences (proto-oncogenes) can be acquired by seemingly innocuous viruses to become cancer genes (oncogenes). Dr. Verma's laboratory also discovered a new transforming gene, Fos, which turned out to be a transcriptional factor, essential for the induction of a wide variety of genes in response to a plethora of external signals. These studies established the principle that acquisition of cellular genes capable of transcription of other genes is an important mechanistic event to subvert the normal cellular transcriptional machinery. These studies were extended to novel transcription factors like NF-KB and their role in the neoplastic transformation of the cell. More recently Dr. Verma's laboratory has cleverly exploited the use of mouse genetics to pinpoint the role of many of these oncogenes/transcription factors in normal cellular growth, differentiation, and development. Dr. Verma's laboratory in 1983 developed the first viral delivery system to transfer therapeutic genes to cells and animals. Dr. Verma's laboratory laid the basis for the use of mouse RNA tumor viruses as delivery vehicle, which has become the mainstay of the field of gene therapy. Dr. Verma's laboratory over the last 15 years has continuously refined the use of viral vectors for successful gene delivery. His laboratory has shown that mice and dogs suffering from hemophilia (a clotting disorder) due to deficiency of factor IX gene product, can be cured by a single injection of viral vectors making factor IX gene product. These results have formed the basis of current clinical trials with hemophiliacs. In his quest for an efficient, safe, and versatile delivery system, Dr. Verma's laboratory has tamed the dreaded AIDS virus (HIV) to become an efficient and safe delivery vehicle. His pioneering work in this area has lead to the generation of a highly efficient and versatile gene delivery system to cure a wide variety of genetic diseases. Dr. Verma, though a basic scientist, has been an ardent supporter of translational research, "bench to bedside". He was a founder of one of the first gene therapy related biotech companies in the world, Cell Genesys. Presently he serves on the board of this company and chairs their scientific advisory board. Cell Genesys is presently embarking upon seven cancer related clinical trials, and is gearing up to treat hemophiliacs. Dr. Verma has been on the editorial boards of a number of international scientific journals, including serving as editor-in-chief of Molecular Therapy, a journal specializing in gene therapy. He is also handling editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). Exploiting the knowledge in the area of signal transduction, Dr. Verma founded another biotech company, Signal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (now CellGene) to try to identify small molecules capable of interfering with diseases like cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation, etc. Dr. Verma firmly believes that a rational drug design based on the precise knowledge developed by working on model systems is the way of future molecular medicine. Because of his pioneering work in the biotechnology arena, Dr. Verma is on the scientific advisory boards of several biotech companies. More recently Dr. Verma has been helping a number of Indian information technology (IT) companies to enter the field of biotechnology to begin to mine enormous biological information. Dr. Verma has had a long-standing association with the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and has helped it to formulate its cherished goal of starting a biotechnology revolution in India. Dr. Verma's scientific contributions have been widely recognized by a number of honors, which include the American Cancer Society Professorship (lifetime), an Outstanding Investigator Award from the NIH, membership in the Third World Academy of Science, the National Academy of Science, India, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and an associate member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Dr. Verma has also received numerous awards, including the 2008 Vilcek Foundation Prize, and invited lectureships at various national and international organizations. Dr. Verma combines the best of basic science with its applications to medicine. He has, by example and as a spokesman, championed the cause of biotechnology for the benefit of the common man. Dr. Verma strongly believes that the purpose of science in the long run is to improve the quality of life of humankind.
 
38Name:  Dr. John Wilmerding
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  401. Archaeology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1938
   
 
John Wilmerding is Sarofim Professor in American Art Emeritus in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and former visiting curator in the Department of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and a commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. He was formerly Senior Curator of American Art and Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where he organized the landmark exhibition "American Light: The Luminist Movement" in 1980. In 2002, he was reappointed by President George W. Bush to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. Professor Wilmerding is the author of many books and catalogs on American art, including American Marine Painting, American Views, and The Artist's Mount Desert as well as studies of Robert Salmon, Fitz H. Lane, John F. Peto, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Richard Estes, Robert Indiana, and Tom Wesselmann. An exhibition of his collection, "American Masters from Bingham to Eakins", was held at the National Gallery of Art in 2004, at which time he announced the gift of the collection to the Gallery.
 
39Name:  Dr. Susan Wolf
 Institution:  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  406. Linguistics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1952
   
 
Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. in math and philosophy from Yale University in 1974 and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1978. She taught at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of North Carolina faculty in 2002. She has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and the University College, Oxford, as well as the Visiting Belle van Zuylen Chair at the University of Utrecht. She has also held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women and the Guggenheim Foundation. Recently she received the Mellon Foundation's award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Dr. Wolf is the author of Freedom Within Reason (1990), a book on free will and moral responsibility, and has written numerous articles on ethics and the philosophy of mind. These include Morality and Partiality, Two Levels of Pluralism, Self-Interest and Interest in Selves, Moral Saints, and Asymmetrical Freedom. Her current research focuses on the relations among happiness, morality, and meaningfulness in life.
 
40Name:  Dr. Peter Guy Wolynes
 Institution:  Rice University
 Year Elected:  2006
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1953
   
 
Peter G. Wolynes was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. He completed his undergraduate studies at Indiana University, receiving an A.B. degree in 1971. He then took up the study of statistical mechanics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1976. After a brief postdoctoral study with John Deutch at MIT, Dr. Wolynes returned to Harvard as an assistant professor in 1976. During the next four years at Harvard, Dr. Wolynes worked on the dynamical theory of electrolyte solutions, as well as on the then-nascent theoretical study of molecular dynamics of proteins. His early work on the theory of chemical reaction rates in condensed phases paved the way for the explosion of theoretical developments in this area throughout the 1980s. In 1980 Dr. Wolynes moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he progressed to be the Eiszner Professor of Chemistry and a Center for Advanced Study Professor of Chemistry, Physics and Biophysics. During the years he spent at Illinois, Dr. Wolynes worked on a wide range of theoretical problems in chemical physics, including the theory of the glass transition and the development of new techniques for studying quantum dynamics in condensed phases. He developed, in 1981, the quantum mechanical version of Kramers' celebrated 1940 theory of chemical reaction rates in solution. In addition, Dr. Wolynes provided a new picture of how energy flows quantum mechanically in moderate-sized molecules. Dr. Wolynes' interest in applying statistical mechanics to biology grew while he was at Illinois. He introduced energy landscape ideas to the field of protein folding, providing a statistical mechanical framework to understand how a one-dimensional sequence of amino acids folds to its native structure on a biologically relevant time-scale. These ideas have led to what has been termed the "New View" of protein folding kinetics. Energy landscapes have also proved useful in developing algorithms to predict protein structure from sequence. Dr. Wolynes' scientific contributions have been acknowledged in many ways. He received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1986, the Fresenius Award in 1988, the Peter Debye Award for Physical Chemistry in 2000 and the Biological Physics Prize of the American Physical Society in 2004. Among other external appointments, he was the Hinshelwood lecturer at Oxford in 1997 and Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the National Institutes of Health starting in 1994. He was elected in 1991 to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and in 2003 was elected a Fellow of the Biophysical Society. In 2000 Dr. Wolynes moved to University of California, San Diego, where he held the Francis Crick Chair in the Physical Sciences. In addition to continuing his work on many body chemical physics and protein folding he is now studying stochastic aspects of cell biology. In 2011, Dr. Wolynes moved to Rice University in Texas where he is the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science.
 
Election Year
2006[X]
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