| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Gary Ruvkun | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Gary Ruvkun is currently Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Hans-Hermann Schoene Distinguished Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982.
Gary Ruvkun discovered, with Victor Ambros, that small non-coding RNAs play a central role in eukaryotic gene regulation. Prior to this discovery it was universally assumed that the regulation of gene expression was controlled entirely by proteins. The discovery of a whole new layer of regulation mediated by what are now known as micro-RNAs has revolutionized thinking about regulatory mechanisms. Ruvkun’s genetic studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of micro-RNA biogenesis and action. In a second major advance, Ruvkun and Cynthia Kenyon provided the first convincing evidence that organismal aging is controlled by genetic programs, thereby opening a new approach to the study of aging. Finally, Ruvkun has studied how organisms respond to toxins, showing that it is not individual compounds that are recognized but rather their toxic effects, such as slower protein synthesis. Detection of toxicity then leads to a multi-faceted response aimed at countering the toxic insult.
Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, 2008; Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2015. Author: (B. Reinhart et al.) “The 21 nucleotide let-7 RNA regulates developmental timing in C. elegans,” Nature, 2000; (A. Pasquinelli et al.) “Conservation of the sequence and temporal expression of let-7 heterochronic regulatory RNA,” Nature, 2000; (Y. Liu et al.) “Caenorhabditis elegans pathways that surveil and defend mitochondria,” Nature, 2014. National Academy of Sciences, 2008; National Academy of Medicine, 2009; American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2009. Gary Ruvkun was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Patrick Spero | | | Institution: | George Washington Presidential Library
at Mount Vernon | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | 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: | 1978 | | | | | | |
Patrick Spero received his B.A. from James Madison University in 2000, his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 and 2009 respectively. He held a number of public history jobs while pursuing his Ph.D., including serving has Historian at the David Library of the American Revolution. From 2009-2011, he served as the Pew Post-Doctoral Fellow in Bibliography at the American Philosophical Society Library, where he surveyed the Society’s early American manuscript collections and wrote a guide to these collections. Dr. Spero then joined the faculty of Williams College until 2015, when he returned to the Society as its Librarian. Before joining the Society, Spero organized several international conferences and directed numerous teacher workshops. He is the author of numerous articles, essays, and reviews and has published two books, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (W.W. Norton, 2018) and Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). He is also co-editor of The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Clifford J. Tabin | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Clifford J. Tabin is the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. Tabin began his work in developmental biology during a brief postdoc in the laboratory of Doug Melton at Harvard University, before leaving a year later for a position as an independent Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1989.
Tabin pioneered the molecular genetic analysis of embryonic development of vertebrates, and ever since has been a leader in the field that attempts to understand how limbs and digits develop in individuals and evolve in different species. He has made outstanding contributions to the question of how bilateral symmetry in appendages like wings and legs is regulated, and how, in contrast, asymmetry arises in development, as in the placement of the heart in humans and in the coiling of the intestine. In other pioneering work his group have identified genes that regulate the length and depth of the beaks of Darwin’s finches, and genes that are responsible for the loss of pigment and vision in cave fish. He established a preclinical science education program in the medical school in Kathmandu in Nepal in order to train doctors to work with poor people in rural areas.
He received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1999, the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology in 2008, and the Society for Developmental Biology’s Conklin Medal in 2012. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2000, the National Academy of Sciences since 2007, and the Royal Society of London since 2014. Tabin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Philip Tetlock | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Philip E. Tetlock was born in Toronto, Canada in 1954 and completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in1979. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley (1979–1995; 2000-2010) and the Ohio State University (1995-2000). Since 2011, he has been the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with cross-appointments in Psychology, Political Science and the Wharton School. He has received awards for research accomplishments from the American Psychological Association, American Political Science Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, International Society of Political Psychology, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and four foundations (MacArthur, Sage, Grawemeyer, and Carnegie).
Over the last four decades, Tetlock's research program has explored five themes:
1. the concept of good judgment, with special emphasis on using "tournaments" as a method of exploring correlates and determinants of: (i) subjective-forecasting accuracy in world politics; (ii) proficiency at drawing correct causal/counterfactual lessons from history in complex simulations of world politics (Tetlock, 2005; Tetlock & Belkin, 1996; Tetlock & Gardner, 2015);
2. the impact of accountability on judgment and choice, with special emphasis on the socio-cognitive strategies that people use to cope with different forms of accountability (who must answer to whom, for what, and under what ground rules?) (Tetlock, 1992; Lerner & Tetlock, 1999);
3. the constraints that sacred values place on the thinkable, with special emphasis on three types of proscribed cognition (taboo trade-offs, for bidden base rates and heretical counterfactuals) (Tetlock, 2003);
4. the difficult-to-define distinction between value-neutral and value-charged scholarship, with special emphasis on debates on whether certain research programs in social psychology have or have not crossed that line (Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986; Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009);
5. the role that hypothetical-society experiments can play in helping to disentangle fact from value judgments in macro-distributive-justice debates, such as income inequality. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Judith Jarvis Thomson | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 407. Philosophy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | November 20, 2020 | | | | | | |
Judith Jarvis Thomson was Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. Her teaching career includes Barnard College, Boston University, and as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Judith Jarvis Thomson has been a leading contributor to the flourishing of moral and political philosophy in America since the 1960s. She is best known for her defense of abortion and for her subtle and pioneering use of “trolley problem” thought experiments as a tool for understanding interpersonal morality, which has set the agenda, and provided a model, for much subsequent work. Thomson’s ingenious use of examples, and her rigorous yet extremely readable style, have made her writing widely influential. Her important book, The Realm of Rights, used this same method of argument from carefully crafted examples to develop a general account of morality based on rights, drawing important connections between morality and law, particularly the theory of torts. Thomson was one of a small number of women philosophers to rise to great prominence in the field in the second half of the twentieth century, paving the way for many others.
She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88) and the Quinn Prize of the American Philosophical Association in 2012. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1989) and the American Philosophical Association (president, Eastern Division, 1992-93). Her works include Acts and Other Events (1977), Rights, Restitution, and Risk (1986), The Realm of Rights (1990), and Normativity (2008). Judith Jarvis Thomson was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. She died on November 20, 2020. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. David A. Tirrell | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
David A. Tirrell is the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair, and Provost at the California Institute of Technology. Tirrell was educated at MIT and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He joined the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University as an assistant professor in 1978, returned to Amherst in 1984, and served as Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UMass before moving to Caltech in 1998. He served as chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 1999 until 2009, and as Director of the Beckman Institute from 2011 until 2018. Tirrell’s research interests lie in macromolecular chemistry and in the use of non-canonical amino acids to engineer and probe protein behavior. His contributions to these fields have been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to all three branches (Sciences, Engineering and Medicine) of the U.S. National Academies. | |
| 27 | Name: | Professor Patricia J. Williams | | | Institution: | Northeastern University; Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 504. Scholars in the Professions | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Patricia Williams is currently James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University as well as Columnist for The Nation. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1975. Prior to moving to Columbia, she worked in the Office of the City Attorney of Los Angeles, for the Western Center on Law and Poverty of Golden Gate University School of Law, at the City University of New York Law School at Queens College, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Patricia Williams is a preeminent theorist of race in relation to law in modern American public life, an esteemed scholar and celebrated public intellectual. Her first book was an immediate classic, not only for her penetrating insights at the intersection of race, gender and rights consciousness, but also for her analysis of everyday life as the setting where equality’s vexed and contradictory lifeworlds matter and are worked out – if they are. She is highly regarded as a critical race theorist, feminist theorist, and civil rights scholar; her influence makes these veins of scholarship necessary and accessible to each other. She also brought a new voice to scholarship and journalism – immersed in observed experience, yielding evidence unseen in the more filtered formality of conventional academic writing. Signs of her stature include her many awards, the Reith Lectures (BBC), and her place in Columbia’s oral history archive.
Her awards include the Pioneer of Civil and Human Rights Award of the National Conference of Black Lawyers in 1990 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. She is on the board of advisors at the Center of Constitutional Rights and the board of directors at the National Organization for Women. She is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991), The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (1995), and The Blind Goddess: A Reader on Race and Justice (2011). Patricia Williams was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1970 | | | | | | |
Xiaowei Zhuang is the David B. Arnold Professor of Science at Harvard University and an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her laboratory has developed single-molecule, super-resolution and genomic-scale imaging methods, including STORM and MERFISH, and has used these methods to discover novel molecular structures in cells and cell organizations in tissues.
Zhuang received her BS in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, her PhD in physics in the lab of Prof. Y. R. Shen at University of California, Berkeley, and her postdoctoral training in biophysics in the lab of Prof. Steven Chu at Stanford University. She joined the faculty of Harvard University in 2001 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2005.
Zhuang is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization, a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. She received honorary doctorate degrees from the Stockholm University in Sweden and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She has received a number of awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, National Academy of Sciences Award in Scientific Discovery, Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics, American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, MacArthur Fellowship, etc. | |
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