APS Member History

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21	Name:	Mr. Maurice Frederick Strong
	Institution:	United Nation's University for Peace; Peking University; Environmental Foundation, China; Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia
	Year Elected:	1993
	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:	1929
	Death Date:	November 28, 2015

	A native of Canada, Maurice Strong grew up during the Great Depression, escaping poverty to become a successful businessman in the oil and utilities industries. He became a senior advisor to United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan. In 1972, as director of the U.N. Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, he successfully placed global environmental issues on the international agenda for the first time, and twenty years later, in 1992 he convened the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the largest international conference in history. Attended by 110 heads of state and government, the conference resulted in the adoption of Agenda 21, securing a global consensus and political commitment at the highest level on the sustainable development required to bring global population numbers in line with the finite resources of the Earth. At the conference, Mr. Strong called on the leaders of the world's wealthiest nations to extend significant financial aid to developing countries as reparation for a century of industrial development and environmental degradation. Maurice Strong held a number of other prominent positions, including senior advisor to the president of the World Bank; director of the World Economic Forum Foundation; and president and rector of the U.N. University for Peace in Costa Rica where he was President of the Council. Later, Strong spent most of his time in the People's Republic of China. He was an active honorary professor at Peking University and Honorary Chairman of China's Environmental Foundation. He was also Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia. He had also presented stirring papers on the relation of poverty in developing countries to their population growth, particularly at the Symposium on Population Problems at the 1987 APS autumn meeting. Maurice Strong died November 28, 2015, at the age of 86.

22	Name:	Dr. P. Roy Vagelos
	Institution:	Merck & Co., Inc.
	Year Elected:	1993
	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:	1929

	Roy Vagelos served as Chief Executive Officer of Merck & Co., Inc. for nine years, from 1985-94. He was first elected to the Board of Directors in 1984 and served as its Chairman from 1986-94. He was previously Executive Vice President of the worldwide health products company and, before that, President of its Research Division, which he joined in 1975. Earlier, he served as Chairman of the Department of Biological Chemistry of the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and as Founding Director of the University's Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences. Previously he held senior positions in cellular physiology and biochemistry at the National Heart Institute, after internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. The author of more than 100 scientific papers, Dr. Vagelos received the Enzyme Chemistry Award of the American Chemical Society in 1967. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has received honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Washington University, Brown University, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New York University, Columbia University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Pamukkale University in Turkey, Mount Sinai Medical Center and the University of British Columbia; an honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University; and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Rutgers University. He received the Thomas Alva Edison Award from Thomas Kean, the Lawrence A. Wien Prize from Columbia University, the C. Walter Nicholas Award from New York University's Stern School of Business, the National Academy of Science Award for Chemistry in Service to Society, the Othmer Gold Medal from the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the 1999 Bower Award in Business Leadership from the Franklin Institute. His Majesty the King in Bangkok, Thailand awarded the Prince Mahidol Award to Dr. Vagelos in January 1998. Dr. Vagelos was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania from 1994-99, having served as a trustee since 1988. He also served as Co-Chairman of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center from 1989-99 and was President and CEO of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens from 1999-2001. Dr. Vagelos is a Director of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and a Trustee of The Danforth Foundation. He is also Chairman of the Board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Theravance, Inc. and was Chairman of the Review, Planning and Implementation Steering Committee of New Jersey and the Commission on Jobs Growth and Economic Development.

23	Name:	Mr. Cyrus R. Vance
	Institution:	Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
	Year Elected:	1993
	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:	1917
	Death Date:	January 12, 2002

24	Name:	Dr. Russell F. Weigley
	Institution:	Temple University
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1930
	Death Date:	March 3, 2004

25	Name:	Dr. Gilbert F. White
	Institution:	University of Colorado
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1911
	Death Date:	October 5, 2006

26	Name:	Dr. Benjamin Widom
	Institution:	Cornell University
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1927

	Chemist Benjamin Widom is known for his theoretical contributions to the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of liquids (including complex liquids such as microemulsions and polymer solutions), of phase transitions and critical phenomena, and of interfaces. Currently Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Cornell University, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1953, after which time he joined the university faculty as an instructor in chemistry. He became a full professor in 1963 and chaired the chemistry department from 1978-81. Dr. Widom was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1974 and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1979. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Boltzmann Medal "for his illuminating studies of the statistical mechanics of fluids and fluid mixtures and their interfacial properties, especially his clear and general formulation of scaling hypotheses for the equation of state and surface tensions of fluids near critical points."

27	Name:	Dr. Edward Witten
	Institution:	Institute for Advanced Study
	Year Elected:	1993
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1951

	Edward Witten received a Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1976. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in 1977 and a Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, from 1977-80. He was professor of physics at Princeton University from 1980-87 before joining the Institute for Advanced Study as a professor in the School of Natural Sciences in 1987. He also served for two years as a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. Edward Witten's recent research is at the interface of elementary particle physics and geometry. He has revolutionized the study of three and four dimensional spaces, using insights from quantum mechanics. Invariants of knots in three space, obtained from quantum field theory, is a noteworthy example. He made important contributions to the quantization of gauge theories and is a world leader in developing string theory. Understanding the geometric concepts in terms of which string theory should be formulated is his main goal. Dr. Witten is a brilliant lecturer and an inspiration to a new generation of mathematical physicists. He was a MacArthur Fellowship recipient in 1982 and has also been honored with the Einstein Medal of the Einstein Society of Bern, Switzerland (1985); the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (1986); the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (1986); the Fields Medal of the International Union of Mathematicians (1990); the Klein Medal from Stockholm University (1998); the Dannie Heineman Prize from the American Institute of Physics (1998); the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics from Northwestern University (2000); the Clay Research Award (2001); The Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (2010); the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010); the Solomon Lefschetz Medal by the Mathematical Society of Mexico (2011), the inaugural Fundamental Physics Prize established by Yuri Milner (2012), the Kyoto Prize (2014), and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2016). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1993.

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