APS Member History

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41	Name:	Dr. Carl R. Woese
	Institution:	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	Year Elected:	2004
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	205. Microbiology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1928
	Death Date:	December 30, 2012

	By combining the methods of evolutionary biology and microbiology, Carl Woese used ribosomal RNA sequence data as an evolutionary measure to develop a phylogenetically based classification system, initially for prokaryotic bacteria and ultimately for all living organisms. In doing so he effectively discovered a new domain of life, the Archaea, comprised of unique microbes including methanogens and thermophiles; he also published the first complete genome structure of this newly recognized life form. This work is of profound significance in understanding the origins of life on earth and the process of adaptation to extreme environments. In overturning the long-held traditional dichotomization of life into eukaryotes and prokaryotes, he revolutionized biology, profoundly and fundamentally changed the world's view of living organisms. Dr. Woese was Stanley O. Ikenberry Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois, where he had taught since 1964. A graduate of Yale University (Ph.D., 1953), he had been honored with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award (1984); the Leeuwenhoek Medal (1990); the National Academy of Sciences' Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology (1997); the National Medal of Science (2000); the Crafoord Award of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2003); the 2009 Abbott-ASM Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Microbiology; and membership in the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Carl Woese died December 30, 2012, at the age of 84 in Urbana, Illinois.

42	Name:	Dr. Michael Wood
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	2004
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	401. Archaeology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1936

	As the list of his publications suggests, Michael Wood is a critic of astonishing range, working with literature in several languages and from several periods. He has also written screenplays. His books have been enthusiastically reviewed, and many of them have won more than academic readership. He writes and speaks with perspicacity, wit and penetration, and he concerns himself with large issues (the importance of literature; the social and moral meanings of film; the need for knowledge of diverse cultures) as well as small ones (the texture of prose, the function of an image). Also brilliantly successful as a teacher and administrator, Dr. Wood has been the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University since 1995. Born in England, he holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (1961) and has also taught at Columbia and Exeter Universities. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature, he has authored many books, including Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies, or "Santa Maria, It had Slipped My Mind" (1989); Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1990); The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1995); Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction (1998); and The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003).

43	Name:	Dr. Ying-shih Yu
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	2004
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	405. History and Philology, East and West, through the 17th Century
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1930
	Death Date:	August 1, 2021

	An influential teacher and prolific author, Ying-shih Yu has long earned international recognition as the pre-eminent scholar of Chinese history. The breadth of his research, ranging from views of life and death in first and second-century China, through intellectual history and political culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to eighteenth through twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, is staggering. In his work he combines close and subtle scrutiny of fresh source materials to broad generalization about main themes in Chinese history and culture. His research on a merchant ethos in Chinese society from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, for example, has been influential in articulating the belief in a Confucian work ethic in modern East Asian countries. In May 2001 a group of his former students gathered in Princeton for an unusually stimulating two-day conference on topics ranging over more than two thousand years of Chinese history. Born in China in 1930, Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962 and served as assistant professor there from 1969-77 before moving to Yale University as Charles Seymour Professor of History. In 1987 he joined the faculty of Princeton University as Professor of Chinese Studies and History and became Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies Emeritus in 2001. Dr. Yu's many written works include Views of Life and Death in Late Han China (1962); Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (1967); Fang I-chih wan chieh k'ao (The Death of Fang I-chih), 1611-1671 (1972); "Intellectual Breakthroughs in the Tang-Sung Tradition"; "'O Soul, Come Back!' A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China"; Intellectual History in Late Imperial China: Modern Interpretations (1984); Shih yu Chung-kuo wen-hua (History of Chinese Culture) (1987); and The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century. With fellow APS member John Hope Franklin, Dr.Yu shared the 2006 John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity. He was elected a member of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan in 1974 and of the American Philosophical Society in 2004. He died on August 1, 2021 in Princeton, NJ.

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