American Philosophical Society
Member History

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1Name:  Dr. Orley Ashenfelter
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  302. Economics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
Orley Ashenfelter's areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics. His current research includes the cross-country measurement of wage rates, and many other issues related to the economics of labor markets. Professor Ashenfelter has been the director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University, director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Labor, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Benjamin Meeker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. He is a recipient of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement of the Society of Labor Economists, and the Karel Englis Medal awarded by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He edited the Handbook of Labor Economics, was editor of the American Economic Review, and the co-editor of the American Law and Economics Review. In 2018 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He is a past president of the American Economics Association, the American Law and Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economics. Orley Ashenfelter was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
 
2Name:  Dr. Mary C. Beckerle
 Institution:  Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  202. Cellular and Developmental Biology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1954
   
 
Mary Beckerle, PhD, is CEO and Director of Huntsman Cancer Institute, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center that is a leader in Cancer Genetics and Precision Prevention. She is a Distinguished Professor of Biology, Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs, and holds the prestigious Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah. Beckerle earned her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and completed post-doctoral research at the University of North Carolina. An internationally recognized scientist focused on fundamental aspects of Cancer Cell Biology, Beckerle’s research program has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health. Beckerle’s laboratory has made seminal contributions toward understanding cell adhesion and cell migration. In recent years her team has focused on the mechanisms involved in communicating information from the cell surface to the cytoskeleton and the nucleus. In 2000, Beckerle was appointed as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rothschild-Yvette Mayent Award Scholar at the Curie Institute in Paris. She received the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology in 2001, the Sword of Hope Award from the American Cancer Society in 2004, the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the University of Utah’s highest honor, in 2007, the 2018 Alfred G. Knudson Award in Cancer genetics, and the YWCA Utah 2018 Outstanding Achievement Award in Medicine and Health . Beckerle has served on numerous strategic planning and peer review committees for the National Institutes of Health. She is also a respected leader in science policy and practice, having served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology and on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. She is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Advisory Board and serves on the Board of Directors of both Huntsman Corporation and Johnson & Johnson. In 2016, Beckerle was selected as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel appointed to guide Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, co-chairing the Precision revention and Early Detection Working Group. She is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the National Center for Biological Sciences in India, the Mechanobiology Institute in Singapore, and several National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers. Beckerle has been married to David Murrell since 1990; they have a son, David, who graduated from college in 2017. In addition to spending time with family and friends, Beckerle loves to cook, travel, garden, hike, and bike in the beautiful state of Utah. Mary Beckerle was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
 
3Name:  Dr. Sean B. Carroll
 Institution:  University of Maryland; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  207. Genetics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Sean B. Carroll is a scientist, writer, educator, and film producer. His laboratory research has centered on the genes that control animal body patterns and play major roles in the evolution of animal diversity. He has received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences, been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. Sean is the author of several books for general audiences, including A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (2020), The Serengeti Rules, Brave Genius, The Making of the Fittest, Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Remarkable Creatures, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction. In 2016, Sean received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. Sean is currently Vice President, Science and Educational Media Group at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Head of HHMI’s Tangled Bank Studios. The architect of HHMI’s documentary film initiative, Sean has served as executive producer of nearly forty films, including the Emmy-winning The Farthest and The Serengeti Rules, and Oscar-nominated All That Breathes – the only documentary to win top honors at both Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. In June 2018 he joined the University of Maryland's Department of Biology as the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Endowed Chair.
 
4Name:  Dr. Anne Case
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  302. Economics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1957
   
 
Anne Case’s best known early work was on the political economy of competition between states, and how it affected the elections of governors; this work remains heavily cited today. Today, she is best known for a wide range of work on health, family structure, and demography. Her prize-winning work on the origin of the gradient showed that the effect of family income on child health steepens as the child grows older. She discovered that the inferior morbidity and superior mortality of women comes from the composition of disease: roughly, women get conditions that make them sick, and men get conditions that make them dead. She has made challenging discoveries on the effects of step-parenting, and on the premium that taller people receive in the labor market, which she attributes to nutritional and cognitive deficiencies in very young children. She is one of the leading scholars of the effects of the AIDS epidemic on child and family outcomes in South Africa. Her paper on the deaths of despair among midlife whites in the U.S. won the PNAS’s Cozzarelli Prize and attracted enormous attention. In 2020 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Anne Case was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
 
5Name:  Dr. John Clarke
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1942
   
 
John Clarke has led in the understanding and the development of the SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) and exploration of this high sensitivity device for fundamental studies and applications. He has explored and demonstrated how this device can be used for measurements with a sensitivity up to the quantum mechanical limit. His studies have addressed the sources of 1/f noise, the limits of quantum computing, and the applications of SQUIDs for geological exploration and medical imaging. Clarke has co-authored the "handbook" of SQUID applications for high sensitivity electromagnetic measurements in a wide variety of fields and is universally known for this work.
 
6Name:  Dr. Lorraine Daston
 Institution:  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; University of Chicago
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404c
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1951
   
 
Lorraine Daston studied at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and was awarded her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 1979. She has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, Göttingen, and Chicago and since 1995 has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is also a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity and other epistemic virtues, quantification, observation, algorithms, and the moral authority of nature. The theme that unites all of her work is the history of rationality, both its ideals and practices. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and Corresponding Member of the British Academy. Among the awards that have recognized her work are the Pfizer Medal for best book in the history of science published in English, the Schelling Medal of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, and the Bielefeld Science Prize.
 
7Name:  Dr. Claude S. Fischer
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1948
   
 
Claude S. Fischer is Professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 1972. Most of his early research focused on urban studies, social networks, and economic inequality (The Urban Experience, 1976; Fischer et al., Networks and Places, 1977; To Dwell Among Friends, 1982; Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 1996). More recently, he has worked on American social history: adoption of the telephone (America Calling, 1992); social change during the 20th century (Fischer and Hout, Century of Difference, 2006); and a social history of American culture and character (Made in America, 2010). In 2011, he published Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970. Several of these books have won awards. A collection of his columns for the Boston Review appeared in 2014 as Lurching Toward Happiness in America. His major current project, funded by the National Institute of Aging, is a multi-year panel study of how personal ties change. In 1996, Fischer won Robert and Helen Lynd Award of the American Sociological Association for lifetime contributions to urban studies. In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fischer blogs at http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/ .
 
8Name:  Dr. Benedict H. Gross
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  104. Mathematics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1950
   
 
Benedict Gross has contributed decisively to number theory, algebraic geometry, modular forms and group representations. Gross and Don Zagier solved the class number problem which had been formulated by APS member Karl Friedrich Gauss in 1798. This problem was to give an algorithm to list all discrete rings embedded in the complex numbers with a given class number. The class number is a measure of the failure of unique factorization in the ring. (The analogous problem for the real numbers was already solved by the ancient Greeks. There is only one discrete ring embedded in the real numbers, namely the integers. Euclid in 300 BC proved that unique factorization holds in the integers, hence its class number is 1, the minimum possible value.) The theorem of Gross and Zagier was one of the major achievements in number theory of the 20th century. Gross is an expert on analytic number theory, which exploits the striking relationships between analysis, in the sense of calculus, and arithmetic in the sense of counting. He has made many many diverse discoveries. Most recently, he has explored the role of exceptional Lie groups in number theory. His development of arithmetic invariant theory with Manjul Bhargava promises to generate a whole new field of future research. Together with Joe Harris, he developed a mathematics course for non-mathematicians at Harvard. This led to his popular book, The Magic of Numbers, co-authored with J. Harris, which provides a readable introduction to the patterns that emerge in number behavior and the often surprising applications of these patterns.
 
9Name:  Dr. David Hollinger
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  303. History Since 1715
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1941
   
 
From the time of my first publication in 1968, I have worked primarily in the intellectual and ethnoracial histories of the United States. Thematically, my work has been inspired by an essay of 1967 by the great sinologist, Joseph R. Levenson, "The Province, the Nation, the World: The Problem of Chinese Identity." I read this as a graduate student. It led me to engage the tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism. This tension I have explored in special relation to ethnoracial and religious affiliations. For many years I focused on the relation of Jews to American culture, and later moved to a focus on the varieties of Protestantism and their differing connections to the American nation. Central always has been the diversity of American society, and the challenge Americans have faced in deciding just whom to join with in the forming of communities. Methodologically, my work has been inspired by the scholarship of Perry Miller, the great historian of New England Puritanism, and by the scholarly practices of medievalists. Both of these affected me in graduate school, at the same time I was reading Levenson. Miller showed me what intellectual history could be like, and the medievalists showed me what highly specialized, monographic scholarship on what the Germans call "advanced problems" looked like. I decided early on to try to write modern American history as it would be written by a medievalist. Hence I have written primarily analytic articles in the medievalist manner, focusing on this or that question (e.g., the question of ethnoracial mixture, or the problem of pragmatism). I have aimed not to tell stories, but to answer questions. In keeping with this commitment to the analytic essay as a mode, I published many articles and relatively few book-length studies. This approach to research and writing appealed to me also because it enabled me to address a greater range of topics than if I had followed the normal path for historians, moving from one Big Book to another. Hence four of my books are collections of articles: In the American Province (Indiana University Press, 1985), Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton University Press, 1996), Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), and After Cloven Tongues of Fire (Princeton University Press, 2013). But I also wrote three more conventionally "book-like" books: Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (MIT Press, 1975), Postethnic America (Basic Books, 1995, 2000, and 2006), and Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017). My entire career has been influenced by the experience of moving out of the church-intensive culture of my upbringing and finding myself more at home in the more or less standard, highly secular culture of the academic life of my generation. I have discussed this experience in an autobiographical essay, "Church People and Others," found within the collection, After Cloven Tongues of Fire.
 
10Name:  Dr. Laura L. Kiessling
 Institution:  University of Wisconsin-Madison; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Laura Lee Kiessling has made significant contributions to define intercelluar communication in bacteria and eukaryotes. Her work has led in the elucidation of carbohydrate biochemistry where she shed light on the importance of carbohydrate-cell surface interactions and on the mechanisms of cellular synthesis of complex carbohydrates. Kiessling was an early pioneer in the application of ring-opening polymerization for the preparation of polymer-glycoside conjugates with precisely defined spacing and length. Her research group provided major insight into the mechanisms by which carbohydrate molecular recognition events control cellular signaling. Her main interest currently is in finding a human lectin that recognizes microbial glycans over human glycans. Kiessling has been a leader in the application of chemical synthesis to dissect important biological questions involving multivalent carbohydrate displays.
 
11Name:  Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall
 Institution:  Choate Hall & Stewart LLP; Supreme Judicial Court, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
 Year Elected:  2017
 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:  1944
   
 
Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Margaret H. Marshall is Senior Counsel at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP. Appointed Chief Justice in 1999, she was the first woman to serve in that position. She was first appointed to the Court as an Associate Justice in 1996. Chief Justice Marshall was born and raised in South Africa, obtaining her baccalaureate from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. While an undergraduate, she was elected President of the National Union of South African Students, at the time a leading anti-apartheid organization. She came to the United States in 1968 to pursue graduate studies at Harvard. She received a master's degree from Harvard in 1969 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1976. Following her graduation she practiced law in Boston and became a partner in Choate, Hall & Stewart. In 1992, she was appointed Vice President and General Counsel of Harvard University. During her tenure on the Supreme Judicial Court, Chief Justice Marshall authored many opinions, including Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which declared that the Massachusetts Constitution prohibits the state from denying same-sex couples access to civil marriage. The 2003 ruling made Massachusetts the first state to recognize marriage equality. Chief Justice Marshall has been involved in numerous professional and community activities. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council and Executive Committee of the American Law Institute. She served until June 30 2016 as Senior Fellow of the Corporation of Yale University, the governing board and policy-making body for the University. Chief Justice Marshall is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including one from her undergraduate alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand, and one from her law school alma mater, a 2018 Yale Medal. She received the 2021 Bolch Prize for the Rule of Law.
 
12Name:  Dr. Edward Mendelson
 Institution:  Columbia University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1946
   
 
Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the Literary Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. He has also taught at Yale and Harvard. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, The Things that Matter, and Moral Agents, and he has edited many volumes of work by W. H. Auden as well as novels by Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and has also published in The New York Times Book Review, TLS, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He has been a contributing editor of PC Magazine since 1987.
 
13Name:  Mr. Edward A. Montgomery
 Institution:  Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey
 Year Elected:  2017
 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:  1934
   
 
Edward A. Montgomery, Jr., graduated from Deerfield Academy; he received a BA and LLD from Trinity College, and attended Harvard Business School. He joined Mellon Bank's management training program in 1959, and worked in Data Processing, Cash Management, Credit Policy and Corporate Banking. From 1970 to 1974 he was a Vice President responsible for corporate lending in the New York City division of the Corporate Banking Department. In 1974, he became Manager of the International Banking Department's London Office with responsibility for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In 1977, he returned to the States to become a Senior Vice President of Mellon Bank, and President and Chief Executive Officer of Mellon National Mortgage Corporation. In 1985, he became Vice Chairman of Mellon Bank Corporation and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mellon Bank (East). On August 1, 1989, he retired from the Bank. Upon retirement, he served as the 1989/1990 Campaign Chairman for the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania. He joined the staff of the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania in January 1990 as Vice President of Resource Development and a member of the Management Committee. In 1995 he assumed responsibility for the Tocqueville Society (individuals who give over $10,000 annually) and individual leadership donors outside the workplace. At the end of 2010 he retired from United Way. Since 2010 he has been a full time volunteer staff member of United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey and Honorary Chair, Endowment Campaign and a volunteer consultant to United Way Worldwide, and for not for profits about fundraising, and board roles and responsibilities. He is Vice Chair of the Curtis Institute of Music and Chair of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. He is a Trustee of the Isabel Rockefeller Trust, and the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation. He is on the board of the Marlboro Music School and Festival, Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce (past chairman), and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. He is Trustee Emeritus of the Academy of Natural Sciences (past chairman), Opportunities Industrial Center, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association. Russell Byers Charter School. Teach for America and Trinity College (past chairman). He is a retired director of Fisher Scientifics International, Mellon Bank Corporation, Pullman Corporation, and Wheelabrator Technologies Inc. From 1956 to 1958, he served in the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division. He and his wife Susan (who died in January 2015) have two daughters and two grandsons. Awards: 2014 United Way Worldwide Lifetime Service Award 2014 John Haas Regional Champion Award – UWGPSNJ 1986 Community Leader of the Year – Arthritis Foundation Past Affiliations: Elderhostel Board 12 years beginning in 1990-2003 (one year off), Chairman of the Board Ft. Mifflin 1994-1998 Chairman of the Philadelphia Historical Commission 1987-1994 Chairman and Board member Prince Music Theater 1985-2000
 
14Name:  Dr. Barbara Newman
 Institution:  Northwestern University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1953
   
 
Barbara Newman is the leading north American scholar of medieval cultural studies, with appointments in English, Classics and Religion departments, in all of which areas she has made major historical discoveries and proposed stunning reinterpretations. She has written authoritatively on medieval Latin, German, French, Netherlandish and Italian literature, and more generally on gender studies and the history of mysticism. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval polymath whose wide-ranging interests, including midwifery, prophecy, art, and music, perhaps provide the model for Newman’s own interdisciplinary strengths. An influential teacher of graduate students, editor of numerous texts, and author of wide-ranging interpretative studies, Newman has fostered the field of medieval gender studies into new maturity, writing on secular romance literature, on female spirituality, and on the ways in which theology and literature intersect.
 
15Name:  President Barack Obama
 Year Elected:  2017
 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:  1961
   
 
Barack Obama (Barack Hussein Obama II), fourty-fourth president of the United States, was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Though he was largely raised in Hawaii, he also spent time in Indonesia and in Washington State during his childhood. He attended Occidental College for two years, before transferring to Columbia University. He received a B.A. degree from Columbia in 1983. From 1985-88 Obama worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. As director of the Developing Communities Project he worked with several area churches to organize job training, create education and employment opportunities for young people, and advocate for tenant rights. After entering Harvard Law School in 1988 he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991 with a J.D. degree. Following his graduation Obama began working at University of Chicago Law School, as lecturer from 1992-96 and as senior lecturer from 1996-2004. During this time in Chicago he served on the boards of several Chicago non-profits and in 1992 directed Illinois's Project Vote. He was an attorney with a civil rights law firm from 1993-2004. In 1995 Barack Obama's book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published. The book received great acclaim and was republished in 2004. He was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. He lost a primary campaign for Congress in 2000 but was elected a United States Senator in 2004. During the campaign, in July 2004, he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. In 2006 his second book, The Audacity of Hope, was published. On February 10, 2007 Barack Obama announced his campaign from President. Obama won the Democratic Party nomination and defeated John McCain in the general election held on November 4, 2008. Barack Obama served as President of the United States from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017. His administration's oversaw economic recovery and growth following the 2008 financial crisis, including a significant reduction of unemployment. One of Obama's signature domestic policy accomplishments was healthcare reform. In the foreign policy arena, his administration's achievements include the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba, and a renewed focus on America's relationships in the Pacific region. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Since leaving office Obama has advocated for climate issues, disaster relief efforts, and civic engagement. His Obama Foundation trains and supports civic leaders through programs like Community Leadership Corps, My Brother's Keeper Alliance, and the Obama Foundation Scholars and Fellowship programs.
 
16Name:  Dr. Stuart H. Orkin
 Institution:  Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1946
   
 
Stuart Orkin has made pioneering achievements in defining the molecular basis of blood disorders and fundamental regulatory mechanisms governing the development of blood stem cells and blood lineages. His research is unmatched for its combined impact on our understanding of the genetic basis of blood diseases, the control of hematopoiesis, and the basis of the human fetal (HbF) to adult hemoglobin switch. He provided the first comprehensive molecular dissection of an inherited disorder, the thalassemia syndromes, and isolated the first regulator of blood cell development (GATA1). He identified the first disease gene (X-linked chronic granulomatous disease) through positional cloning. In the past decade, he defined how HbF is silenced in adult red cells starting with genome-wide association studies (GWAS) through to gene editing, work that forms the basis for therapeutic trials to reactivate HbF in thalassemia and sickle cell disease patients. His research is a paradigm for the application of molecular genetics to medicine. In 2018 he was the recipient of the Mecthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science, in 2020 he was awarded the King Faisal Prize in Medicine, and in 2021 he was awarded the 2021 Gruber Genetics Prize.
 
17Name:  Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum
 Institution:  Rice University
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  103. Engineering
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1964
   
 
Guided by the belief that all of the world’s people deserve access to health innovation, Professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum’s research and teaching focus on developing low-cost, high-performance technology for low-resource settings. She is known for providing vulnerable populations in the developing world access to life-saving health technology, focusing on diseases and conditions that cause high morbidity and mortality, such as cervical and oral cancer, premature birth, and malaria. Professor Richards-Kortum’s work in appropriate point-of-care screening technologies has earned her induction into the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, National Inventors Hall of Fame, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Rebecca is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and a member of the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University. After receiving a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1985, she continued her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received an MS in Physics in 1987 and a PhD in Medical Physics in 1990. She joined the faculty in Bioengineering at Rice University in 2005 and served as Chair of Bioengineering from 2005-2008 and 2012-2014. Dr. Richards-Kortum’s research group is developing miniature imaging systems to enable better screening for oral, esophageal, and cervical cancer and their precursors at the point-of-care. She led development of a novel high resolution microendoscope capable of real-time, subcellular imaging of epithelial tissue. Her team developed low-cost (<$2500), robust hardware platforms, including a tablet- and cell-phone based system. Together with colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine and the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, she has carried out clinical trials involving more than 1,000 patients, which show that the device has promise to improve early diagnosis of esophageal, oral, and cervical precancer. In a prospective, multi-center clinical trial carried out in the US and China, high resolution microendoscopy improved specificity for esophageal precancer from 29% to 79%, without reducing sensitivity. Clinical trials of over 15,000 patients in China, Brazil, and El Salvador are now underway. Her group has integrated advances in nanotechnology and microfabrication to develop novel, low-cost sensors to detect infectious diseases at the point-of-care, including HIV, cryptosporidium, malaria, and Tuberculosis. Her group developed a low-cost sensor to detect hemoglobin concentration; the device reduced per test cost by more than 100-fold (less than US$0.01 per test) compared to standard care. She led development of novel nucleic acid tests to enable diagnosis of HIV in infants in low-resource settings, introducing the first integrated paper and plastic device for isothermal amplification of DNA. Together with Maria Oden, Dr. Richards-Kortum led development and dissemination of low-cost, robust technologies to improve neonatal survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Her team developed a $160 bubble CPAP device to treat premature infants with respiratory distress; the device delivers the same flow and pressure as systems used in the US, at 30-fold cost reduction. Clinical evaluation showed that the device improved survival rates from 24% to 65%, mirroring the impact of CPAP when it was introduced in the US. The device has been implemented at all government hospitals in Malawi, and introduced in Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa. In 2014, CPAP was recognized by the UN as one of 10 innovations that can save the lives of women and children now. The team is now developing a comprehensive set of technologies to enable essential newborn care at district hospitals in Africa, with the goal to equip a district hospital serving a catchment area of 250,000 people for less than $10,000. In 2018 Dr. Richards-Kortum was named a U.S. science envoy by the State Department. At Rice University, Dr. Richards-Kortum has established new educational programs in global health technologies. She founded the Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) program in which undergraduate students from multiple backgrounds learn to think beyond geographic and disciplinary boundaries to solve challenges in global health. In 2012, Science awarded BTB the Prize for Inquiry Based Instruction. In addition, the National Academy of Engineering recognized BTB with the Real-World Education Prize for successfully integrating real world experiences into undergraduate curriculum. BTB has also been recognized by ASEE with the Chester Carlson Award (2007) and with the IEEE Educational Activities Board Vice-President Recognition Award (2008). Rebecca is married and has three sons, Alexander, Maxwell and Zachary and three daughters, Katie, Elizabeth, and Margaret.
 
18Name:  Dr. Sabine Schmidtke
 Institution:  Institute for Advanced Study
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1964
   
 
Sabine Schmidtke is a dynamic, wide-ranging, and highly productive scholar of early Islam and its theology. Her command of Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian, together with exceptional facility in modern languages (German, French, and English) allows her to open up new perspectives on early Muslim intellectual life and sectarian debates. As the recipient of a generous Advanced Grant from the European Research Council she was able to set up a major program in Berlin on what she called the Islamicate world. Her organizational skills have become ever more apparent since her move to the United States, where she has planned conferences and launched new programs, including one on a digital database for Ottoman texts. She works directly from manuscripts, in search of which she has traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. She is a formidable scholar who wears her learning lightly. In 2019, she was elected to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
 
19Name:  Dr. Neil H. Shubin
 Institution:  University of Chicago
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Neil Shubin is a scientist, administrator, and writer. Throughout his career, he has been interested in understanding the great transitions of evolution. Leading expeditions around the globe in search of critical intermediate fossils, he has discovered fossil evidence for the origins of terrestrial vertebrates, mammals, frogs, salamanders and other major groups of animals. He also has revealed genetic and developmental mechanisms for these changes by using comparative laboratory-based approaches on modern animals. Linking studies of gene sequence, regulation and function with those of embryology and anatomy, Shubin has revealed deep similarities among different organs that tell of their origins. Educated at Columbia, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, Shubin has held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he currently holds the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professorship in Anatomy. He has held administrative positions at the University of Chicago (Departmental Chair, Associate Dean, and Senior Advisor to the President), The Field Museum (Provost) and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (Co-Director). He is the author of: Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, and Some Assembly Required. The former won the Phi Betta Kappa Science Book Prize and the National Academy of Sciences Scientific Communication Award. Shubin has also received the Distinguished Explorer's Award of the Roy Chapman Andrews Society. Your Inner Fish appeared on PBS as a three-part miniseries. Produced by Tangled Bank Studios of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute it won numerous awards, in eluding an Emmy. Shubin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
 
20Name:  Dr. Beth A. Simmons
 Institution:  University of Pennsylvania
 Year Elected:  2017
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  304. Jurisprudence and Political Science
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1958
   
 
Beth Simmons is a leading scholar of international law and institutions. She has done more than any other scholar to demonstrate the impact of treaties on state behavior and has pioneered studying the international diffusion of policies and institutions, combining historical, case-study, and sophisticated statistical analysis. Her first prize-winning book, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years 1923-1939, brilliantly integrated political science with economics in a study of an important period of international political economy; her second prize-winning book, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics, powerfully demonstrated how international human rights agreements, which lack strong international enforcement, can become effective through mobilization by domestic groups. She has also done extremely important work on the politics and law of international monetary affairs and capital market regulation. Her overall standing in international relations and political science more generally is reflected in the fact that she is the second person to win the Woodrow Wilson Award twice (She is preceded only by Robert Dahl).
 
Election Year
2017[X]
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