APS Member History

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21	Name:	Dr. Piotr Michalowski
	Institution:	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	404b
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1948

	Piotr Michalowski is George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Michigan. Educated at Warsaw and Yale Universities, he then went on to do research and teach at Harvard, UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Michalowski's work concentrates on the literatures, religion, history, historiography, and languages of ancient Mesopotamia, with special attention to the early periods. Dr. Michalowski is currently working on a number of projects, including an edition of a major collection of Sumerian magical texts and an anthology of Sumerian poetry. His most recent publications include work on Sumerian goddesses, a study of the ideology of Nabonidus, the last independent king of Babylon, and a grammatical sketch of the Sumerian language. Also, for the last decade, he has been editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. In light of recent world events, Dr. Michalowski organized and continues to guide the American Coordinating Committee for Iraqi Cultural Heritage. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999, was elected President of the International Association of Assyriologists in 2009, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

22	Name:	Dr. David G. Nathan
	Institution:	Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1929

	David Nathan is one of the most distinguished pediatric hematologists in the country. He has spent his career at Harvard University, where he has been a professor of medicine and professor of pediatrics, and in 1985 he was appointed Pediatrician-in-Chief at Childrens Hospital in Boston. In 1995 he became President of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Nathan has brought to his position scientific excellence, great integrity and a warm humanity. Among other awards he has received the National Medal of Science (1990) and the Henry Stratton Medal of the American Society of Hematology (1995). He earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1955.

23	Name:	Mr. Kenneth H. Olsen
	Institution:	Advanced Modular Solutions, Inc.
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	103. Engineering
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1926
	Death Date:	February 6, 2011

	Kenneth Olsen was well known as the cofounder of Digital Equipment Corporation. Under his leadership, DEC produced the first small interactive computer, the PDP-1 in 1960, the first mass produced minicomputer, the PDP-8 in the late 1960's, and the popular 32-bit VAX computer line in 1977. The VAX immediately became the "workhorse" of the research community. Early in his career as a post World War II graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he developed basic circuits for driving the first magnetic core memories, for which he was recognized by induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Olsen served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the Computer Science and Engineering Board of the National Academy of Sciences. He received an M.S.E.E. from M.I.T. (1952) and was a member of the National Academy of Engineering; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Ken Olsen died February 6, 2011, at the age of 84.

24	Name:	Dr. Robert O. Paxton
	Institution:	Columbia University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1932

	Robert O. Paxton taught modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook in the 1960s and at Columbia University from 1969-97. He served as chairman of the History Department at Columbia from 1980-82, specializing in the study of France under the Nazi Occupation. His principal works in this area are Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (2nd edition, 2001) and, with Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (2nd edition, 1995). He published The Anatomy of Fascism, which has been translated into ten languages, in 2004. Dr. Paxton currently holds the title of Mellon Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia University.

25	Name:	Dr. Hilary Putnam
	Institution:	Harvard University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	407. Philosophy
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1926
	Death Date:	March 13, 2016

	Hilary W. Putnam is the Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty of Harvard, he was Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also taught at Northwestern University and Princeton University (in both the Philosophy Department and Mathematics Departments). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles as well as several honorary degrees. Dr. Putnam is past president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Association for Symbolic Logic. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the British Academy. His books include three volumes of Philosophical Papers published by Cambridge University Press, a book on mind, language and computers titled Representation and Reality, and two volumes of collected papers published by Harvard University Press under the titles Realism with a Human Face and Words and Life. His new book, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World has just been published by Columbia University Press. Dr. Putnam was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1998.

26	Name:	Dr. Paul Schimmel
	Institution:	The Scripps Research Institute
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1940

	Paul Schimmel is the Ernest and Jean Hahn Professor of Molecular Biology and Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and remained on the faculty of MIT until 1997. Dr. Schimmel is the recipient of the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Schimmel has contributed extensively to the understanding of the protein-RNA interactions that are the basis of the universal genetic code. He showed how features in small RNA structures are interpreted as specific amino acids referred to by some as a "second genetic code." Most recently he established how RNA structure plays an essential role in enhancing the accuracy of the genetic code by an error correction mechanism. Also, in other work, Nature magazine cited his development of "expressed sequence tags" as one of the four key developments that launched the human genome project. Author or co-author of 400 scientific papers and of a widely used three-volume textbook on biophysical chemistry, Dr. Schimmel has also applied basic biomedical research to human health. For example, his laboratory discovered human proteins active in blood vessel formation, developed them, and brought them to clinical medicine. He holds several patents and is cofounder or founding director of ten biotechnology companies, of which 5 are publicly traded. These companies are developing new therapies for human disease. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999.

27	Name:	Dr. Roger Newland Shepard
	Institution:	Stanford University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	305
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1929
	Death Date:	May 30, 2022

	Roger Shepard received his Ph.D. from Yale University. Currently the Ray Lyman Wilber Professor of Social Science Emeritus at Stanford University, Dr. Shepard has also served as professor of psychology and director of the psychological laboratories at Harvard University and as a department head at Bell Telephone Laboratories. He is the recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Fund Award, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, the Wilbur Lucius Cross medal of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association, the Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science, and the National Medal of Science. He has also received honorary degrees from Harvard, Rutgers, and the University of Arizona. Dr. Shepard is the author of over 100 scientific papers and three books, including: (with L.A. Cooper) Mental Images and Their Transformations (1982) and Mind Sights (1990, with translations published in German, 1991, French, 1992, Japanese, 1993, and Korean, 1994). He has served as president of the Psychometric Society. Roger Shepard's influential experimental and theoretical contributions to the cognitive and behavioral sciences include his development of widely used methods of multidimensional scaling and clustering for the discovery and quantification of structures implied by qualitative data; his objective demonstration and quantification of the analog nature of imagined spatial transformations and mental imagery; his establishment of a universal law of generalization; and his demonstrations of the role of cognitive structures in visual perception, illusion, and art and in auditory perception, illusion, and music. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999.

28	Name:	Professor Michael I. Sovern
	Institution:	Columbia University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
	Subdivision:	503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1931
	Death Date:	January 20, 2020

	Michael Sovern was an internationally renowned legal scholar, a well-known labor arbitrator and mediator, and a prominent scholar in the fields of labor relations, employment discrimination, and conflict resolution. As dean, provost, and president of Columbia University, Dr. Sovern made notable contributions to Columbia, New York, and the nation. He became a leading spokesman for higher education in efforts to secure adequate federal funding for basic research and student aid through his published articles, speeches, and testimony before legislative committees. He spearheaded efforts to increase education opportunities for minority students. In his 13 years at Columbia, the university's endowment grew by more than a billion dollars, supporting new scholarships and fellowships, and a score of new academic centers, including the Harriman Institute, the National Center for Telecommunications Research, the National Center for Children in Poverty, and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. A graduate of Columbia University Law School (L.L.B., 1955), Dr. Sovern continued to serve as president emeritus and Chancellor Kent Professor of Law at Columbia, after stepping down as university president in 1993. Michael Sovern died January 20, 2020 in New York, New York at the age of 88.

29	Name:	Dr. T. N. Srinivasan
	Institution:	Yale University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	302. Economics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1933
	Death Date:	November 11, 2018

	T. N. Srinivasan was a scholar of world renown in the fields of international trade and economic development. He made innovative contributions to the analysis of poverty, income distribution, and the world trading system. The founder and co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics (1972-76), Dr. Srinivasan was the Samuel C. Park, Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University from 1980 until his retirement. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1962 and was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1982. In addition to his impressive theoretical work, he has a genuine impact on Indian economic policy. He worked for the Perspective Planning Division from 1961-76 and was tapped in by Manmohan Singh to do a review of economic reforms in 1993. T.N. Srinivasan died in Chennai, India on November 11, 2018 at the age of 85.

30	Name:	Dr. Thomas E. Starzl
	Institution:	University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1926
	Death Date:	March 4, 2017

	Thomas E. Starzl was director emeritus of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute of the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center at the time of his death March 4, 2017, at age 90. He received his Ph.D. in neurophysiology and his M.D. degrees at Northwestern University. Completing surgical training at The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Miami, he became a Markle Scholar and faculty member at Northwestern University. In 1962, shortly after joining the faculty at the University of Colorado, Dr. Starzl performed his first kidney transplant and subsequently the world's first human liver transplant. Within a year, he had more kidney transplant recipients surviving than all other surgeons combined. He improved immunosuppression with anti-lymphocyte globulin (ALG), cyclosporine-based treatment and tacrolimus. Largely through Dr. Starzl's efforts, transplantation of all organs came of age. Dr. Starzl joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 1981and performed the first of 30 liver transplants at the university that year, helping make the city the "transplant capital of the world." Retiring from clinical practice in 1991, Dr. Starzl (in collaboration with fellow APS member and Nobel laureate Rolf Zinkernagel) delineated the previously enigmatic mechanisms of organ engraftment and proposed radical modifications of immunosuppression strategy that facilitates these mechanisms. This work served to improve clinical outcomes as well as the overall understanding of the function of the immune system. In recognition of his groundbreaking work, he was awarded the Jonathan E. Rhoads Medal for Distinguished Service to Medicine in 2002 and the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor, in 2004. He received many other honors and awards, including the 2012 Lasker Award and the Blumberg Award from the Hepatitis B Foundation (2014), as well as 24 honorary doctorates from around the world. He published almost 2,200 scientific articles and four books, including his memoir entitled The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon. Thomas Starzl was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1999. In 2016 the Society presented him with the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Science. The citation read, "Tom Starzl has transformed human organ transplantation from science fiction to reliable treatment of fatal diseases, virtually changing medical practice. Fifty years ago when the world had only a handful of surviving kidney transplant recipients he showed that rejection was reversible, allowing consistent success. His introduction of new immunosuppressive agents helped him to accomplish the first liver and multivisceral transplants. His studies explain liver regeneration and determine that this organ controls lipid metabolism. His discovery of persistent donor cell chimerism in successful recipients points the way to allograft tolerance without chronic immunosuppression. In recognition of his profound contributions the American Philosophical Society salutes Thomas E. Starzl by awarding him its highest honor."

31	Name:	Mr. Frank Stella
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
	Subdivision:	501. Creative Artists
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1936

	One of the most significant abstract painters of the last fifty years, Frank Stella is an important figure in minimalism, post-painterly abstraction and offset lithography (a technique he devised). After studying history at Princeton University, he began work in 1958 on a series of strikingly sombre and intelligent paintings known as the black paintings. The Museum of Modern Art recognized the power of these paintings, which addressed themselves simultaneously to the empirical limitations of the flat space of paintings and the temporal extent of human life. Soon after this work was recognized with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, his restrained style was unleashed in a series of paintings that broke open the pictorial surface, appearing now as large 3-dimensional planes of aluminum. Painted in bright colors, these paintings launched a novel investigation of pictorial space that was uniquely recognized by a second retrospective. In 1983, in recognition of Stella's interest in aesthetic theory, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. In recent years he has taken on large-scale projects for public spaces and has received architectural commissions. He was presented with the John Singleton Copley Award in 2012 and the National Artists Award of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2015.

32	Name:	Dr. Richard F. Thompson
	Institution:	University of Southern California
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	209. Neurobiology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1930
	Death Date:	September 16, 2014

	Richard Thompson received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He was a professor at the University of Oregon School of Medicine from 1959-67 and a professor at the University of California, Irvine from 1967-73 and 1975-80. He was then professor, Karl Lashley's Chair, at Harvard University from 1973-75 and the Bing Professor of Human Biology and Psychology at Stanford University from 1980-87. He then became the Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences and Director of the Neurosciences Program at the University of Southern California. He was a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association and the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He received the 2010 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement from the American Psychological Foundation. He was the author of Foundations of Physiological Psychology (1967); (with others) Psychology (1971); and Introduction to Physiological Psychology (1975). Dr. Thompson served on the council of the Society for Neuroscience and as president of the American Psychological Society. He devoted his life to the study of brain substrates of behavior. His text, Foundations of Physiological Psychology, was a landmark in the development of modern behavioral neuroscience, as was his later founding and editing of the APA journal, Behavioral Neuroscience. Inspired by Karl Lashley's "search for the engram," his research was focused on neural mechanisms of learning and memory, initially in the now classic work with W.A. Spencer on habituation. Dr. Thompson and his students utilized basic associative learning in mammals, characterizing processes of memory formation in two brain structures: hippocampus and cerebellum. They appear to have localized one form of memory trace to the cerebellum, thus coming full circle to Lashley's initial quest. Dr. Thompson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999 and was awarded the Society's Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 2007 "In recognition of his distinguished contributions to understanding the brain substrates of learning and memory. Specifically, through his meticulous and diligent application of the eyeblink classical conditioning paradigm, Thompson discovered the essential role of the deep cerebellar nuclei, as an essential component of classically conditioned procedural memory formation, and that plasticity within the synapses of these nuclei represent the long-elusive memory trace that Lashley had sought." Richard Thompson died September 16, 2014, at age 84.

33	Name:	Dr. Kip S. Thorne
	Institution:	California Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1940

	Born in Logan, Utah in 1940, Kip Thorne received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technolgy in 1962 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1965. He returned to Caltech as an associate professor in 1967 and became Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1970, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor in 1981, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. Dr. Thorne's research has focused on Einstein's general theory of relativity and on astrophysics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes and especially gravitational waves. He was co-founder (with R. Weiss and R.W.P. Drever) of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project, with which he is still associated. He is a member of the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) International Science Team. Dr. Thorne was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the Russian Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1999. He has been awarded the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomical Society, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. For his book for nonscientists, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (1994), Dr. Thorne was awarded the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Science Writing Award, and the (Russian) Priroda Readers' Choice Award. In 2017 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Dr. Thorne has won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." He was also a science consultant to the screenwriter and director of the 2014 film Intersteller and wrote the book The Science of Intersteller to explain the very deep physics that underlies some of the amazing sights from the movie: black holes, higher dimensions and 4,000 foot-tall waves. In 1973 Dr. Thorne co-authored the textbook Gravitation, from which most of the present generation of scientists have learned general relativity theory. Approximately 40 physicists have received the Ph.D. at Caltech under Dr. Thorne's personal mentorship.

34	Name:	Dr. Sam Bard Treiman
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1925
	Death Date:	11/30/99

35	Name:	Dr. Evon Zartman Vogt
	Institution:	Harvard University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	4. Humanities
	Subdivision:	403. Cultural Anthropology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1918
	Death Date:	May 13, 2004

36	Name:	Dr. Myron Weiner
	Institution:	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	304. Jurisprudence and Political Science
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1931
	Death Date:	6/3/99

37	Name:	Dr. Bernhard Witkop
	Institution:	National Institutes of Health
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1917
	Death Date:	November 22, 2010

	Bernhard Witkop was a distinguished organic chemist who had made major contributions to biochemistry, pharmacology, and medical sciences. His research involved major contributions to the chemistry of familiar-sounding substances or processes, such as the isolation from the Colombian tree frog of the toxin batrachotoxin, a godsend to electrophysiologists. He made important contributions to research on antiviral agents, interferon, dopamine, genetically engineered proteins and metabolic pathways. His cyanogen bromide cleavage reaction made possible the production of the first 100 Kg of engineered insulin by Eli Lilly. In Dr. Witkop's paper "Mind Over Matter" he assumes "the uneasy role of the scientist as philosopher" and presents a scholarly and profound contribution on this topic so central to most philosophers. Later in his life Dr. Witkop dedicated efforts to historical biography. He worked at the National Institutes of Health since 1987, where he is Scholar Emeritus. A native of Germany, Dr. Witkop held Ph.D. (1940) and Sc.D. (1946) degrees from the University of Munich.

38	Name:	Dr. M. Gordon Wolman
	Institution:	Johns Hopkins University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	105. Physical Earth Sciences
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1924
	Death Date:	February 24, 2010

	M. Gordon Wolman is the B. Howell Griswold, Jr. Professor of Geography and International Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University. A native of Baltimore, Dr. Wolman was educated at Johns Hopkins (B.A., 1949) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1953) and has taught at Johns Hopkins since 1962, prior to which he worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. Dr. Wolman's research has focused on human activities and their interactions with the natural processes impacting the earth's surface, specifically, the control of quantity and quality of streamflow and the behavior of rivers. His studies of environmental processes have involved him in work on environmental policies dealing with water, land and energy resources. Dr. Wolman's work has been recognized with many awards including the Cullman Geography Medal of the American Geography Society, the Rachel Carson Award, the Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geological Institute, the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America and the Horton Medal of the American Geophysical Union. A past president of the Geological Society of America, Dr. Wolman was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1988 and the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1999.

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