Subdivision
• | 101. Astronomy |
(1)
| • | 104. Mathematics |
(1)
| • | 105. Physical Earth Sciences |
(1)
| • | 106. Physics |
(1)
| • | 107 |
(1)
| • | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry |
(3)
| • | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology |
(2)
| • | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology |
(1)
| • | 209. Neurobiology |
(1)
| • | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology |
(1)
| • | 303. History Since 1715 |
(1)
| • | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science |
(3)
| • | 305 |
(2)
| • | 401. Archaeology |
(1)
| • | 402b |
(3)
| • | 404a |
(1)
| • | 408 |
(2)
| • | 501. Creative Artists |
(3)
| • | 502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions |
(1)
| • | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors |
(5)
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| 1 | Name: | Dr. Ruth Arnon | | Institution: | The Weizmann Institute of Science | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | Residency: | International | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | | | Prof. Arnon joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1960. Prior to her appointment as Vice-President, she served as Head of the Department of Chemical Immunology, and as Dean of the Faculty of Biology. From 1985 to 1994, she was the Director of the Institute's MacArthur Center for Molecular Biology of Tropical Diseases. Prof. Arnon has made significant contributions to the fields of vaccine development, cancer research and to the study of parasitic diseases. Along with Prof. Michael Sela and Dr. Dvora Teitelbaum she developed Copaxone,® a drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and is presently marketed in the USA, Canada the EU, Australia and many other countries worldwide. Prof. Arnon is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, and serves as its Vice-President since 2004. On the world scene, she is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). She has served as President of the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS), and as Secretary-General of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS), as well as in the European Union Research Advisory Board (EURAB). Her awards include the Robert Koch Prize in Medical Sciences, Spain's Jiminez Diaz Memorial Prize, France's Legion of Honor, the Hadassah World Organization's Women of Distinction Award, the Wolf Prize for Medicine, the Rothschild Prize for Biology, and the Israel Prize, Honorary degree – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, The AESKU Prize for Life Contribution to Autoimmunity by the 6th International Congress on Autoimmunity, “Yakir” Tel-Hai Academic College, Israel, Elected to the American Philosophical Society. Prof. Arnon is also the Scientific Advisor to the President of the State of Israel. Prof. Arnon is the incumbent of the Paul Ehrlich Chair in Immunochemistry. | |
2 | Name: | Mr. Emanuel Ax | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | Emanuel Ax is considered to be in the front rank of today’s pianists and has been widely recognized for both solo and chamber work as well as for chamber performance. He has won many awards, including seven Grammy Awards, five of which were for his chamber music (1986, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1996) and the other two were for his solo performances of Haydn (1995, 2004). In 1974, he won the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel-Aviv and in 1979 he was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize. More recently, Columbia University presented him with the Alexander Hamilton Medal for Distinguished Service and Accomplishment (2003) and he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2007). Ax has performed frequently with APS member Yo-Yo Ma and regularly plays at music festivals such as Mainly Mozart, Ravinia, and Tanglewood. They (Ax and Ma) released Hope Amid Tears in 2021. | |
3 | Name: | The Honorable Robert Badinter | | Institution: | Paris University I, Pantheon Sorbonne; French Council | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | Subdivision: | 502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions | | Residency: | International | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1928 | | Death Date: | February 9, 2024 | | | | | Robert Badinter is the President of the OSCE Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, a Senator in the Senate of France, and a Professor of Law Emeritus at the Paris University I, Panthéon Sorbonne. He has served as the President of the Arbitration Commission for the Former Yugoslavia, a member of the Brussels Convention for the European Constitution, and a member of the United Nations High Level Panel. Robert Badinter has dedicated his long career to a more human justice and fundamental freedoms. As Minister of Justice, he was the author of the bill of abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981. He has been active in the creation of the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague and the International Criminal Court. He is the author of many books, including: The Execution, 1973; Libertés, Libertés, 1975; (with E. Badinter) Condorcet: An Intellectual in Politics, 1988; Free and Equals: The Emancipation of the Jews (1789-1791), 1989; Another Justice, 1990; The Penitentiary System of the Republic, 1992; The Republican Prison (1873-1914), 1993; Ordinary Antisemitism: Vichy and the Jewish Lawyers, 1997; The Abolition, 2000; A European Constitution, 2002; The Greatest Good, 2004; Against Death Penalty, 2006. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. | |
4 | Name: | Dr. Benedict Anderson | | Institution: | Cornell University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1936 | | Death Date: | December 12, 2015 | | | | | Benedict Anderson had been the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies at the Government and Asian Studies Department in Cornell University since 2002, where he had taught since 1967. He died December 12, 2015, at age 79 in Batu, Indonesia. He was an expert on Indonesia and Southeast Asia and a leading theorist and historian of nationalisms whose work is standard reading in the humanities as well as the social sciences. His 1983 work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, highlights the role of national myths and print culture in creating the idea of a national community and analyzes the development of European nation-states as derivative from the creation of nations in the Americas. His other works include Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944-46 (1972), Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990), The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (1998), and Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005). He was the 1998 winner of the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies from the Association of Asian Studies and the 2000 winner of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, 2000. | |
5 | Name: | Dr. Ann M. Blair | | Institution: | Harvard University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 404a | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and a specialist of early modern European intellectual and cultural history. Her interests include the history of science, especially traditional natural philosophy and the relations between science and religion (e.g. in The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science, Princeton University Press, 1997), and the history of education, the history of the book and of methods of working. Her articles include discussions of the methods of note-taking and of responses to overload in early modern Europe (e.g. in Critical Inquiry 2004, and the Journal of the History of Ideas 2003). In her forthcoming book with Yale University Press she examines the role and nature of Latin reference books 1450-1700, in light of earlier models and sources as well as the new resources and challenges that resulted from printing. | |
6 | Name: | Dr. Larissa Bonfante | | Institution: | New York University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1932 | | Death Date: | August 23, 2019 | | | | | Larissa Bonfante was Professor of Classics at New York University (1963-2006). Born in Italy, she came with her family to the United States as a child by way of Spain and Geneva, Switzerland. She held a BA from Barnard College, an M.A. in Classics from the University of Cincinnati, and a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, with Otto Brendel as dissertation adviser. Her first published article was "Emperor, God and Man: Julian the Apostate and Ammianus Marcellinus," followed by Etruscan Dress (1975). Further work on ancient dress, originally inspired by the works of Margarete Bieber, included an NEH Summer Seminar on the Symbolism of Roman Costume (1988), and publications on the Roman triumph, and nudity as a costume in classical art. Brendel’s statement, "we take the Greeks as our model, forgetting that they did everything differently from everyone else," helped direct her focus on the non-Greeks of the classical world, for example in The Etruscan Language, written with her father, the Indo-Europeanist Giuliano Bonfante.
Bonfante was a member of the German Archaeological Institute, the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici, founder and President of its US Section, and co-editor of Etruscan News. She was Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1980, received teaching awards at New York University for her work with undergraduates, and the 2007 Gold Medal for Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America. She delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lecture Series in 2006-07 and the AIA Norton Lecturesship in 2007-08. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009. Larissa Bonfante died August 23, 2019 in New York, New York at the age of 88. | |
7 | Name: | Mr. Warren Edward Buffett | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | 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: | 1930 | | | | | Warren E. Buffett is considered one of the leading investors in the United States and perhaps the world. He has been the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at his company, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. since 1970. He has always been a constructive investor, interested in the long-run success of a corporation as distinguished from short-run profit. He won the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award in 2002, the University of California, Berkeley Award for Distinguished Contributions to Financial Reporting in 2007, and the 2010 Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1992. | |
8 | Name: | Dr. Pierre Deligne | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | Pierre Deligne has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 1984. He is the world's leading algebraic geometer, having received his Doctorat en mathématiques from the University of Brussels in 1968 and his Doctorat d'Etat des Sciences Mathématiques from the University of Paris-Sud in 1972. The methods he introduced have so completely permeated the subject that a large portion of the current research in algebraic geometry can't even be formulated without them. Consequently, his research is constantly referred to by young workers in the field. So far as is known, Deligne is the only mathematician in history to be commemorated by a postage stamp during his lifetime (.70 Euro, Belgium). He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978, the Crafoord Prize in 1998, the Balzan Prize in Mathematics in 2004, the Wolf Prize in 2008, and the Abel prize in 2013. He belongs to the Académie des Sciences, Paris (1978), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1978), the National Academy of Sciences (2007), and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2009). | |
9 | Name: | Dr. Michael W. Doyle | | Institution: | Columbia University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | Michael W. Doyle is a University Professor of Columbia University and Director of the Columbia Global Policy Initiative.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, he was educated in France and Switzerland and received his high school diploma from Jesuit High School, Tampa, Florida. He studied at the U.S. Air Force Academy for two years (and also qualified as a parachutist at Fort Benning) before transferring to Harvard University, where he earned his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. (in Political Science in 1977). As an undergraduate he won the Detur Prize and was named John Harvard Scholar. As a graduate student, he held the Atherton Prize Fellowship and a Resident Tutorship in Government in Leverett House. He completed his military service in the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Professor Doyle previously has taught at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University and Yale Law School. His authored books include: (with Fred Hirsch and Edward Morse) Alternatives to Monetary Disorder (1977); Empires (1986); UN Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC's Civil Mandate (1995); Ways of War and Peace (1996); (with Nicholas Sambanis) Making War and Building Peace (2006); Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict (2008); and The Question of Intervention (2015). He has also edited several publications, including (with Ian Johnstone and Robert Orr) Keeping the Peace: Multidimensional UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador (1997); (with John Ikenberry) New Thinking in International Relations Theory (1997); (with Olaru Otunnu) Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century (1998); and (with Jean-Marc Coicaud and Anne-Marie Gardner) The Globalization of Human Rights (2003). He has also published numerous articles, chapters in books and occasional essays including "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs: Parts I and II," in Philosophy and Public Affairs. He delivered the Tanner Lectures on "Anticipatory Self-Defense" at Princeton University, November 8-9, 2006.
He directed the Center of International Studies at Princeton University and chaired the Editorial Board and the Committee of Editors of World Politics. He was the vice-president and senior fellow of the International Peace Academy and is now a member of its board of directors. He has also served as a member of the External Research Advisory Committee of the UNHCR and the Advisory Committee of the Lessons-Learned Unit of the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations (UN). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. In 2001, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
In 2001-2003, he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His responsibilities in the Secretary-General’s Executive Office included strategic planning (the "Millennium Development Goals"), outreach to the international corporate sector (the "Global Compact") and relations with Washington. He is the former chair of the Academic Council of the United Nations System. From 2006 to 2013 he was an individual member and the chair of the UN Democracy Fund, elected by the members and appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Michael Doyle is married to Amy Gutmann. They have a daughter and son-in-law and live in Philadelphia and New York. | |
10 | Name: | Dr. Ellen V. Futter | | Institution: | American Museum of Natural History | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | 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: | 1949 | | | | | Ellen V. Futter has been President of the American Museum of Natural History since 1993. Before joining the museum, she served as President of Barnard College for 13 years where, at the time of her inauguration, she was the youngest person to assume the presidency of a major American college. Committed to public service, Ms. Futter serves on the boards of several non-profit and for-profit organizations. She formerly served as Chairman of the Board of New York Federal Reserve Bank. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has received numerous honorary degrees and awards. Ms. Futter graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, from Barnard in 1971 and earned her J.D. degree from Columbia Law School in 1974. Her career began at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy where she practiced corporate law. Ellen V. Futter was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009. | |
11 | Name: | Mr. Philip Glass | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | Philip Glass’s musical life began early; at eight he studied the flute at the Peabody Conservatory and by twelve he had begun composing. After receiving an M.A. in composition from Juilliard in 1961, he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in India with the sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. Glass’s composition matured in the early seventies, largely through works written for his own Philip Glass Ensemble. In 1974, with a performance of the complete Music in Twelve Parts at the New York Town Hall, he had his first performance in a traditional concert hall. Two years later Einstein on the Beach premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, bringing Glass accolades from the larger music world. This master work combines disparate media moments in unconventional visual juxtaposition with textless vocal exercises and numerals varying in pitch and rhythm. The operas Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984) followed - the former portraying the early years of Mahatma Gandhi and utilizing a dronelike repetition of symmetrical sequences of chords to achieve haunting and hypnotic powers. In recent years Glass has focused increasingly on composition for theater, film and dance. His film scores have received three Academy Award nominations – for Kundun (1997), The Hours (2002) and Notes on a Scandal (2006) - and his collaborations with the director Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi, et al) are audiovisual tone poems of uncommon elegance and visceral power. All told, over the last 25 years, Glass has composed 22 operas, eight symphonies, 38 film soundtracks, numerous string quartets and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. In addition to his Academy Award nominations, Glass won a Golden Globe Award in 1999, the Asquith Award for Film Music in 2002, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2010. He won a New York City Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture in 2013. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1994. | |
12 | Name: | Mr. A. R. Gurney | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1930 | | Death Date: | June 13, 2017 | | | | | A.R. Gurney was a prolific playwright who dissected the fading folkways of the Northeast's traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society, of which he himself was a member. Among his plays are Scenes from American Life; The Dining Room; The Cocktail Hour; Love Letters; Slyvia; Later Life; Far East; Ancestral Voices; Big Bill; Mrs. Farnsworth; Indian Blood; Buffalo Gal; The Grand Manner; Black Tie; Heresy, and Family Furniture. He had written three published novels, several television scripts, and the libretto for Michael Torke's Strawberry Fields, commissioned and produced by the New York City Opera. Gurney was a Professor of Literature at M.I.T. before devoting himself full time to the theatre. He is a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has honorary degrees from Williams College and Buffalo State University. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009. A. R. Gurney died June 13, 2017, at the age of 86, in Manhattan. | |
13 | Name: | Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham | | Institution: | Harvard University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and has held this position since 2006. She also served as Acting-Director of Harvard’s W.E. B. Du Bois Institute in the Spring 2008. Professor Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in American History, an M.A. from Howard University, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before coming to Harvard, she taught on the full-time faculties of Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University.
Professor Higginbotham is most recently co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of the African American National Biography (2008), a multivolume-reference work that presents African American history through the lives of people. The AANB holds more than 4,000 individual biographical entries and will later appear as an on-line edition in even more expanded form. She also co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., African American Lives (2004), which served as the forerunner to the AANB. Professor Higginbotham was the editor-in-chief of The Harvard Guide to African-American History (2001) with general editors Darlene Clark Hine, and Leon Litwack. She also co-edited History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates and Contestations (1997). Higginbotham is the author of Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920 (1993), which won numerous book prizes, most notably from the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion,
the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Association for Research on Non-Profit and Voluntary Organizations. Righteous Discontent was also included among the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Her writings span diverse fields--African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history. One of her most cited and reprinted articles is "African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race," winner of the best article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993. Higginbotham has revised and re-written the classic African American history survey From Slavery to Freedom. She is the co-author with the late John Hope Franklin of this book’s ninth edition, published by McGraw Hill in January, 2010.
Dr. Higginbotham has received numerous awards. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History awarded her the Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion in October 2008, and the Urban League awarded her the Legend Award in August 2008. In April 2008, Unity First honored her for preserving African American History. In March 2005, AOL Black Voices included her among the "Top 10 Black Women in Higher Education." In April 2003 she was chosen by Harvard University to be a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in recognition of her achievements and scholarly eminence in the field of history. In 2000 she received the YWCA of Boston’s Women of Achievement Award, and in 1994 the Scholar’s Medal of the University of Rochester. Most recently, in 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal. | |
14 | Name: | Dr. Douglas Hofstadter | | Institution: | Indiana University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 305 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | Douglas Hofstadter is currently a professor of cognitive science and computer science and of comparative literature at Indiana University, having previously been the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. His first book, Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), spans fields from philosophy of mind to mathematical logic, molecular biology and artificial intelligence. The book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the American Book Award for the same year and was the inspiration for the field of cognitive science. His collected Scientific American columns appeared in Metamagical Themas (1985), and his work Ambigrammi (1987) contains original art and an essay on creativity. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1994) summarizes two decades of research and articles on human analogy-making and creativity, with simulations of pattern perception and generation in alphabets, music and numbers, such as Copycat, Metacat, Magnificat, Jumbo, Tabletop, Letter Spirit, Seqsee and PHAEACO. Le Ton beau de Marot (1997) is a wide-ranging study of creative literary translation, stressing equal roles for form and content, and I Am a Strange Loop (2007) covers the nature of the self and human consciousness and won the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. | |
15 | Name: | Dr. Nina G. Jablonski | | Institution: | Pennsylvania State University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | Nina G. Jablonski: Short Biographical Sketch
I was born and raised in upstate New York, and owe my interest in natural history to my upbringing on a farm. I was inspired to pursue a career in the study of human evolution by documentary accounts of the famed paleontologist, Louis Leakey, who recovered important fossils of ancient humans at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. I completed an A. B. at Bryn Mawr College with a major in biology in 1975, and then went on to complete a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Washington in 1981. I have always had an insatiable interest in reconstructing the lifestyles and appearance of extinct animals, including our ancestors.
My research has focused on primate and human evolution, and in particular, on the role that changing environments have played in shaping the adaptations of primates and humans through time. I studied the anatomy and evolution of a lineage of Old World monkeys for my dissertation, and have maintained and expanded that research to consider the evolution of the whole group in relation to changes in the physical and biotic environment through time. I have been fortunate to be able to participate in paleontological field work in eastern Africa and many parts of southern and eastern Asia. I have a current paleontological field project in Yunnan Province in southwestern China that involves the exploration of a late Miocene primate-bearing site.
In contrast to many of my colleagues, I enjoy the study of important aspects of primate and human evolution that are not recorded in the fossil record, including the evolution of skin. This research is challenging because it requires drawing upon diverse bodies of evidence, from anatomy and physiology to epidemiology and climatology in order to try to determine why and how evolution took the course that it did.
I became interested in the specific problem of the evolution of human skin color quite by accident when, in 1991, I was asked by a colleague to give a lecture on skin. Realizing that little was known about why skin color variation existed in humans and that new data existed to shed light on the mystery, I embarked on what I thought would be a short excursion into this area of research. Nearly 20 years and many serendipitous discoveries later, the biological and social meaning of skin color has grown to be one of the main foci of research, because of its many ramifications for human health and the quality of human interactions. My research on the evolution of human skin and skin color has been done mostly in collaboration with my husband, George Chaplin. Together we have demonstrated that skin color is the product of natural selection acting to regulate levels of melanin pigment in the skin relative to levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in the environment. Melanin is a natural sunscreen that prevents the breakdown of certain essential biomolecules (in particular, the B vitamin folate, and DNA), while permitting enough UVR to enter the skin to promote the production of essential vitamin D. This research led to my being awarded in 2005 one of the first Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowships ("Guggenheims for race"), in addition to the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.
I am committed to bringing science to the public. In 2006, I published the book, Skin: A Natural History (University of California Press), that examined the evolutionary history and cultural importance of skin. I am now working on another book, on the biological and social meaning of skin color. In addition to books and popular articles, I enjoy giving lectures and interviews on human evolution. Many of these are now available in various formats on the internet. I have also collaborated on many scientific documentaries on human and primate evolution for American, European, and Asian television networks.
In 2023, Nina Jablonski becaame an Atherton Professor and Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Pennsylvania State University. | |
16 | Name: | Dr. Richard C. M. Janko | | Institution: | University of Michigan | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 402b | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | Richard Janko is the current Else Collegiate Professor of Classical Studies and former Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, having previously taught at Columbia University and University College, London. He has added new insights and dimensions to our understanding of structure and chronology of archaic Greek literature though his pioneering work in applying computer techniques and through his superb and wide-ranging knowledge of Greek language and culture. He is the author of many works, including: Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction, 1982; Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II, 1984; Aristotle: Poetics, 1987; The Iliad, A Commentary, books 13-16, 1992; Philodemus: The Aesthetic Works, Volume I: On Poems, 2000. Janko was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award from the UCLA Students' Union in 1992, the Premio Theodor Mommsen in 2002, and the Goodwin Award from the American Philological Association in 2002 and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2006) and of the American Philological Association. | |
17 | Name: | Dr. Yuet Wai Kan | | Institution: | University of California, San Francisco | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | Yuet Wai Kan is a graduate of the University of Hong Kong Medical School and is at present the Louis K. Diamond Professor of Hematology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has served on many organizations including as the President of the American Society of Hematology (1990) and currently as Chairman of the Croucher Foundation in Hong Kong that supports science and technology in Hong Kong. He works in the fields of hematology and genetics, and his research led to the innovation of DNA diagnosis that has found wide applications in many human conditions. In recognition of his contributions, he has been elected a member of learned science academies in the United States, Great Britain, Taiwan and China. He has received several honorary degrees and many national awards, including the Lasker Award for Medical Research (1991), international awards from Canada, Italy and Switzerland, and most recently the Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine from Hong Kong (2004). He was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2011. | |
18 | Name: | Dr. Peter J. Katzenstein | | Institution: | Cornell University | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | Peter J. Katzenstein, the current Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, is one of the principal creators of the field of international and comparative political economy.
Between 1975 and 1985 he showed how domestic political structure, shaped by history, affects state policies in response to economic interdependence. During the next decade, he wrote innovative comparative studies of how Germany and Japan responded to the legacies of defeat in the context of globalization. Subsequently, he became a major proponent of the role of norms and cultural variation in world politics, linking structure with culture in his analysis of international security. Most recently, he has published a major work on regionalism and co-organized the first scholarly, social scientific book on anti-Americanism.
He was the winner of the Helen Dwight Reid Award from the American Political Science Association (1974), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award (1986), and was a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University (2004). In 2020 he received the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, widely considered the most prestigious international award in the discipline. His works include: Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States, 1978; Corporatism and Change: Austria, Switzerland and the Politics of Industry, 1984; Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe, 1985; Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semi-sovereign State, 1987; The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, 1996; A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium, 2005; Rethinking Japanese Security: Internal and External Dimensions, 2008. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1987 and was elected president of the American Political Science Association for the 2008-2009 term. | |
19 | Name: | Dr. Anthony A. Long | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 402b | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | I was born August 17, 1937 in Manchester, England, where my parents were secondary school teachers. As a high-school student, I was introduced to Plato by my school's charismatic principal. That experience was the primary reason I decided to study Classics as an undergraduate. After two years of military service I entered University College London where I had the good fortune to be taught by some of Britains's most outstanding scholars of Greek and Latin. I graduated BA in 1960, and was immediately appointed Lecturer in Classics, specializing in ancient philosophy, at the University of Otago, NZ. While teaching at Otago, I completed a PhD for the University of London with a dissertation on abstract nouns in Sophocles. This was the basis for my first book, Language and Thought in Sophocles (1968).
In 1964 I left Otago in order to return permanently to Britain, where I held appointments, first at the University of Nottingham, then at University College London, and finally as Gladstone Professor of Greek at the University of Liverpool (1973-83). During these years I made several visits to the USA, most significantly in 1978-9, when I held fellowships consecutively at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. Princeton gave me my first experience of teaching graduate seminars, which I found so rewarding that I decided I would move permanently to the USA if I were offered a suitable position. That opportunity soon emerged at the University of California at Berkeley, where I have been Professor of Classics since 1983 and Irving Stone Professor of Literature since 1991, with occasional absences as visiting professor or fellowship holder in Germany, France, and Holland.
Although my first book was on Sophocles, my first article (1963) was a study of Parmenides, and it is ancient philosophy that has been the primary focus of my research. That has always included the early Greek philosophers on whom I edited a volume in the Cambridge Companion series (1999), but in 1967 I began a series of studies of the Hellenistic philosophers, especially Stoics, and these thinkers have remained the principal focus of my research ever since. When I began this work, Hellenistic philosophy was very much a minority pursuit, but it has now definitely become main stream. My first attempt to publicize it was a general study, Hellenistic Philosophy. Stoics, Sceptics, Epicureans (first edition 1974), which has been translated into seven languages. In collaboration with David Sedley (Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge), Cambridge University Press commissioned me to publish a two-volume source book of the principal texts of the Hellenistic Philosophers with philosophical commentary (1987). This work has been translated into French and German.
Since then, I have continued to work on many Hellenistic philosophical topics and Roman thinkers, including Cicero, Seneca and Epictetus on whom I published Epictetus. A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (2002). At the same time, I have been working extensively on ancient models of mind and selfhood, with reference to all periods of ancient philosophy, and also on conceptual connexions between theology and rationality. I hope in due course to complete two further books on these topics. | |
20 | Name: | Dr. Rowena G. Matthews | | Institution: | University of Michigan | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | Rowena G. Matthews is the G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University Professor of Biological Chemistry and a Research Professor and Charter Faculty Member, Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. She is an internationally recognized authority on the role of folate- and B12-dependent enzymes in homocysteine metabolism and their relevance to disease. Her discoveries define the biochemical basis for establishing guidelines for folate levels in human nutrition. Matthews has also played a major role in the formulation of science policy both nationally and internationally. She was a member of an international advisory panel for the Advanced Study Institutes of NATO from 1994-96, served on the Council of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 1991-94, and participated in the activities of the Federal Science Policy Committee on Science of the House of Representatives. Additionally, she won the 2000 William A. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the 2001 Repligen Award, from the American Chemistry Society. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2002 and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2005. | |
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