American Philosophical Society
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21Name:  Dr. Jacques Mehler
 Institution:  SISSA-International School for Advanced Studies
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1936
 Death Date:  February 11, 2020
   
 
Jacques Mehler investigates language processing and language acquisition in the first year of life. After having explored processing in speakers of various languages he proposed that syllables play a salient role in speech perception. More recently he devoted his investigations to explore properties of speech signals that could act as triggers of mechanisms that allow infants to bootstrap into language. His group has found that the rhythmic-class of the native language is computed by humans even a few days after birth. Human neonates distinguish when a language switch involves a change in rhythmic-class. His group is now adopting non-invasive brain-imaging methods to complement previously obtained behavioral measures with neonates. He has investigated why it is that the human brain/mind system acquires natural languages with greatest facility at a young age. He has also explored the consequences of continuous exposure to two languages during the first year of life. In 1964 he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He worked at CNRS (Paris, France) from 1967 until 2001. He became Directeur de Recherche at CNRS in 1980 and he was elected Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1982. In 1972 he founded "Cognition," International Journal of Cognitive Science, acting as Editor-in-Chief until 2007. In 2001 he moved to SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy) where he directs the Language, Cognition and Development laboratory. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2001) and of the Academia Europaea. He was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa from Université Libre de Bruxelles (1995) and from University and Politechnic of Torino (2009). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009. His publications are available at http://www.sissa.it/cns/lcd/publications.htm.
 
22Name:  Dr. Craig C. Mello
 Institution:  University of Massachusetts Medical School; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1960
   
 
Craig C. Mello is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Mello and his colleague Andrew Fire, Ph.D., of Stanford University, received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), a natural gene silencing mechanism triggered by double-stranded RNA. RNAi provides both a powerful research tool for knocking out the expression of specific genes and opens a totally unanticipated window on gene regulation. Dr. Mello holds a B.S. in biochemistry from Brown University and a Ph.D. in cellular and developmental biology from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before joining University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1994.
 
23Name:  Dr. Franco Moretti
 Institution:  Stanford University
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  402b
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1950
   
 
Franco Moretti, the current Danily & Laura Louise Bell Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University founded the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford, a center that has been energetic, lively and imaginative in its promotion of critical discussion of the novel. He has written many culturally significant books, including: Signs Taken for Wonders, 1983; The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, 1987; Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, 1995; An Atlas of the European Novel, 1998; Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, 2005. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006.
 
24Name:  Dr. Ellen Mosley-Thompson
 Institution:  Ohio State University
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  105. Physical Earth Sciences
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1948
   
 
Ellen Mosley-Thompson is a Distinguished University Professor, Senior Research Scientist in the Byrd Polar Research Center at the Ohio State University. She was Director of the Byrd Polar Research Center from 2009-2016. Dr. Mosley-Thompson holds a B.S. degree in physics and a Master’s and Ph.D. in climatology and atmospheric sciences. She uses the chemical and physical properties preserved in ice cores collected from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers to reconstruct the Earth’s complex climate history. These records indicate that the Earth’s climate has moved outside the range of natural variability experienced over at least the last 2000 years. Dr. Mosley-Thompson has led a total fourteen expeditions to drill ice cores at remote locations in Antarctica and Greenland. She established Antarctica’s most extensive and longest running snow accumulation network at South Pole Station. In addition to her election as a member of the American Philosophical Society (2009) Dr. Mosley-Thompson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009). She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received the Dan David Prize (2008), the Roy Chapman Andrews Society 2007 Distinguished Explorer Award, The Common Wealth Award for Science and Invention (2002), and the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal (2012). Weblink 1: http://www.geography.osu.edu/faculty/emt/ Weblink 2: http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/GroupP.html#ellenmosleythompson
 
25Name:  Dr. Robert B. Pippin
 Institution:  University of Chicago
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  408
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1948
   
 
Robert B. Pippin is the current Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego. Arguably more than anyone else in the Anglo-American philosophical world, Robert Pippin is responsible for the very considerable rise of interest in Hegel's thought that has taken place since the publication of his pathbreaking book Hegel's Idealism (1989). For Pippin, Hegel is not simply one of the great figures of the philosophical past; rather, from the first he has found in Hegel an exemplary thinker for the present age, one whose writings have first to be understood in the context of problems inherited from Kant and his immediate successors, but which then can be seen to bear closely on problems in the philosophy of mind, art, action and Continental and English-language traditions. More recently, Pippin has ranged widely across the 19th and 20th centuries, with magisterial essays on figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blumenberg, Gadamer and Strauss, as well as a highly original book on the novelist Henry James. He is currently putting the final editorial touches to a book-length study of Hegel's theory of agency. He was the 2001 winner of the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. As mentioned, he has authored a number of books, including: Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason, 1982; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, 1991; Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, 1997; Henry James and Modern Moral Life, 2000; The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, 2005; Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, 2008. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2007.
 
26Name:  Dr. Alejandro Portes
 Institution:  Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1944
   
 
Alejandro Portes is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. He has formerly taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the John Dewey Chair in Arts and Sciences; Duke University, and the University of Texas-Austin. In 1997 he was elected president of the American Sociological Association and served in that capacity in 1998-99. Born in Havana, Cuba, he came to the United States in 1960. He was educated at the University of Havana, Catholic University of Argentina, and Creighton University. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Portes is the author of 200 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. He has published 30 books and special issues. His books include City on the Edge - the Transformation of Miami (California, 1993), co-authored with Alex Stepick and winner of the Robert Park Award for best book in urban sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for best book in urban anthropology in 1995; and Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd edition (California, 2006), designated as a Centennial Publication by the University of California Press in 1996. His current research is on the adaptation process of the immigrant second generation in comparative perspective, the role of institutions on national development, and immigration and the American health system. In 2001 he published, with Ruben G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation and Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (California, 2001). Legacies is the winner of the 2002 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association and of the 2002 W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Award for best book from the International Migration Section of ASA. Five volumes of his collected essays have been published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. His most recent articles have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, International Migration Review, and Population and Development Review. Portes is a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and of the Russell Sage Foundation. He has received honorary doctorates from the New School for Social Research, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Genoa, Italy, as well as the Distinguished Career Award from the Section on International Migration of the American Sociological Association. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008 he received the annual Award for Scientific Reviewing (social and political sciences) from the National Academy of Sciences.
 
27Name:  Dr. Helen R. Quinn
 Institution:  SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  106. Physics
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1943
   
 
Helen R. Quinn works as the Assistant to the Director for Education and Public Outreach and previously worked as a professor and chair of the PPA Faculty at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Helen Quinn's work with Georgi and Weinberg on the unification of gauge coupling constants still plays a central role in attempts to find a unified theory of all interactions. The mechanism she proposed with Peccei to assure parity and time-reversal invariance in strong interactions has had far-reaching consequences for model building and axion searches. Her recent research has focused on deciphering the details of the tiny violations of these symmetries. She is a member of the BABAR collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center that, together with the BELLE collaboration in Japan, provided the first evidence for such effects in B-mesons. She contributes to the Particle Data Group, which maintains an updated compilation of data in particle physics and cosmology, and has been active in outreach and education efforts. She has done important service for the national physics community, in particular as president of the American Physical Society. She was the 2000 winner of the Dirac Medal and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1998) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003). In 2016 she was awarded the AIP Karl Compton Medal.
 
28Name:  Dr. Alison Fettes Richard
 Institution:  Yale University
 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:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1948
   
 
Professor Alison Richard, who was installed as the 344th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge on October 1, 2003, was the first woman to hold the position full time. She stepped down as Vice-Chancellor in 2010. An anthropologist with a first degree from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate from the University of London, Professor Richard joined the faculty of Yale University in 1972. She was appointed full professor in 1986, chairing the Department of Anthropology from 1986 to 1990 and later serving as Director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. She was appointed Provost of Yale in April 1994 and oversaw major strengthening of Yale's financial position and significant growth in academic programs. At Cambridge, Professor Richard launched an ambitious fundraising campaign for one billion pounds to underpin and augment core expenditure, introduced new measures for the stewardship of the University's investments, and developed a bursary fund to ensure that undergraduate students and applicants are not disadvantaged by the national introduction of higher university tuition fees. She also sponsored internal policy initiatives, including a review of Cambridge's international relationships and its international student policy. Professor Richard holds honorary degrees from Peking University, China (2004), the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar (2005), York University, Canada (2006), the University of Edinburgh, UK (2006), Queens University Belfast (2008) and Anglia Ruskin University (2008). In 2005 she was appointed Officier de l'ordre National (Madagascar) and in 2008 she received the prestigious Addison Emery Verrill Medal from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours.
 
29Name:  Professor Daniel Roche
 Institution:  Collège de France
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  408
 Residency:  International
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1935
   
 
Daniel Roche is a Professor at the Collège de France. In his career as teacher and scholar, Daniel Roche has been one of the greatest forces in the renewal of historical studies over the last thirty years. As a specialist on urban societies, his work has focused upon three lines of inquiry: understanding the link between urban milieu and both scholarly and popular forms of culture; analyzing the birth of societies of consumption taking both material and intellectual culture as their starting point; and, finally, demonstrating mobility in traditional societies. His many works include (titles translated from French): The Century of the Enlightenment in the Provinces: Provincial Academies and Academicians, 1689-1789, 1978; The People of Paris: Essay on Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1981; Diary of My Life: Critical Edition of the Diary of Jacques-Louis Ménétra, an Eighteenth-century Master Glazier, 1982; Paris under the Old Régime, 1983; French People and the Old Régime, I. Society and State, II. Culture and Society, 1984; French Republicans of Letters: Persons of Culture and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century, 1988; The Culture of Appearances: Essay on the History of Clothing in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1989; France of the Enlightenment, 1993; A History of Ordinary Things: Birth of the Society of Consumption, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 1997; Paris Almanac for Foreigners, 2001; Wandering Moods: the History of Voyages and the Journeyings of Peoples, 2003. He is a member of Academia Europea (1989) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1998).
 
30Name:  Dr. Donna E. Shalala
 Institution:  U.S. House of Representatives; University of Miami
 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:  1941
   
 
Donna E. Shalala is U.S. Representative for Florida's 27th Congressional District. Prior to her election in 2018 she was Trustee Professor of Political Science and Health Policy at the University of Miami, having previously served as president of the University of Miami and Professor of Political Science (2001-15). During a two year leave from the University of Miami, she was president and chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation (2015-17). Donna received her A.B. in history from Western College for Women and her Ph.D. from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She served as President of Hunter College of CUNY from 1980 to 1987, and as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1987 to 1993. In 1993, President Clinton nominated her as Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) where she served for eight years. In 2008, President Bush presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civilian award. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran from 1962-1964. In 2010, she received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights recognizing her dedication to improving the health and life chances of disadvantaged populations in South Africa and internationally.
 
31Name:  Mr. George Soros
 Institution:  Soros Fund Management, LLC; Open Society Institute
 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
   
 
George Soros is the Founder and Chairman of the Soros Fund Management, LLC and the Founder of the Open Society Institute. At the time of the transition in central and eastern Europe from communism to their current governments in the 1980s and early 1990s he emerged as one of the leading philanthropists in the world with his support for those societies. More recently he has become a social commentator, dealing both with philosophical and economic issues. To a rare degree his life encompasses improving the world with his own money based upon his philosophical reflections. He has written a number of books, including: The Alchemy of Finance, 1988; Opening the Soviet System, 1990; Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise and Democratic Reform Among the Soviets and in Eastern Europe, 1991; Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, 1995; The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, 1998; (with M. Notturno) Science and the Open Society: The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy, 2000; Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, 2001; George Soros on Globalization, 2002; The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, 2003; The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror, 2006; The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, 2008. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1998).
 
32Name:  Dr. Robert Tjian
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1949
   
 
Robert Tjian served as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in April 2009 through the end of 2016 and then returned to his lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Trained as a biochemist, he has made major contributions to the understanding of how genes work during three decades on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He was named an HHMI investigator in 1987. Tjian studies the biochemical steps involved in controlling how genes are turned on and off, key steps in the process of decoding the human genome. He discovered proteins called transcription factors that bind to specific sections of DNA and play a critical role in controlling how genetic information is transcribed and translated into the thousands of biomolecules that keep cells, tissues, and organisms alive. Tjian's laboratory has illuminated the relationship between disruptions in the process of transcription and human diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and Huntington's. More recently, he has begun studying how transcription factors control the differentiation of embryonic stem cells into muscle, liver, and neurons. Tjian, 59, was born in Hong Kong, the youngest of nine children. His family fled China before the Communist Revolution and eventually settled in New Jersey. Known as a voracious consumer of scientific information and data, Tjian famously talked his way into the biochemistry laboratory of the late Daniel Koshland as a Berkeley undergraduate—even though he had never taken a single course in the subject. Tjian went on to receive a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Berkeley in 1971 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with James Watson, he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1979. At Berkeley, Tjian assumed a variety of leadership roles, including spearheading a major campus initiative to support and implement new paradigms for bioscience teaching and research. He served as the Director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, and the Faculty Director of the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received many awards honoring his scientific contributions, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. He was named California Scientist of the Year in 1994. As president of the Institute, Tjian remains an active scientist. His small laboratory group at HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus is focused on the development of new approaches to image biochemical activities in single living cells. He will also maintain a research laboratory at UC Berkeley, where he is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. Tjian and his wife, Claudia, an attorney, have two daughters.
 
33Name:  Dr. James W. Valentine
 Institution:  University of California, Berkeley
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  2. Biological Sciences
 Subdivision:  203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1926
 Death Date:  April 7, 2023
   
 
James W. Valentine is the Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and the Faculty Curator Emeritus at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. He previously taught at the University of Missouri, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. James Valentine has made important contributions to evolutionary history by combining paleontology with data from genetics, zoology, botany and other life sciences. He conducted groundbreaking research on the Cambrian Explosion and was among the first paleontologists to use molecular data to investigate the origin of major Metazoan body plans. His papers with Eldridge Moores are among the foundation documents in the plate tectonics revolution and helped establish the University of California, Davis geology department as a leader in the field. In his seminal work Evolutionary Paleoecology of the Marine Biosphere, Valentine employs a hierarchical approach to integrate studies on the environmental and climatic factors that have regulated biotic diversity, and he continues these studies today. A dedicated scholar of the life and work of Charles Darwin, Valentine has built a collection of virtually every edition of Charles Darwin in every language, including 26 of 29 British first editions. He was awarded the Paleontology Society Medal in 1996. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.
 
34Name:  Dr. John E. Warnock
 Institution:  Adobe Systems, Inc.
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  107
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1940
 Death Date:  August 19, 2023
   
 
John E. Warnock is Co-chairman of the Board of Directors of Adobe Systems, Inc., a company he co-founded in 1982 with Charles Geschke. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining 16 years at Adobe. Warnock has pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, Web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the field of publishing and visual communication. Warnock's entrepreneurial success has been chronicled by some of the country's most influential business and computer industry publications, and he has received numerous awards for technical and managerial achievement. A partial list of awards includes: University of Utah Distinguished Alumnus Award; Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software Systems Award; the National Medal of Technology (2008); and the National Medal of Science (2009). Dr. Warnock has also received the Edwin H. Land Medal from the Optical Society of America, the Bodleian Medal from Oxford University, and the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society. Warnock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has received Honorary Degrees from the University of Utah and the American Film Institute. Warnock has been a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems Inc., Knight-Ridder, Ebrary Inc., Netscape Communications, and Salon Media Group. His is past Chairman of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. He also has served on the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute, and is on the Board of the Sundance Institute. Before co-founding Adobe Systems, Warnock was principal scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Prior to joining Xerox, Warnock held positions at Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, and the University of Utah. Dr. Warnock hold seven patents, B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering all from the University of Utah.
 
35Name:  Dr. Robert W. Wilson
 Institution:  Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
 Year Elected:  2009
 Class:  1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
 Subdivision:  101. Astronomy
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1936
   
 
Robert W. Wilson is a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts. He is technical leader of the Sub-Millimeter Array, an 8 element synthesis radio telescope built by SAO in conjunction with ASIAA near the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. From 1977 until 1994 Dr. Wilson was Head of the Wireless Technology Research Department (formerly Radio Physics Research Dept.) of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. The Wireless Technology Research Department did applied research on wireless access: components and subsystems, new applications of simple inexpensive systems, and design and architectures which support higher levels of integration. In its former incarnation, the Radio Physics Research Department did research on microwave and millimeter-wave semiconductor devices and components as well as radio astronomy at those wavelengths. Dr. Wilson received a B.A. "With Honors in Physics" from Rice University in 1957 and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1962. After a year at the Caltech Owens Valley Radio Observatory as a postdoctoral fellow, he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of technical staff. His early work was in the fields of Galactic radio astronomy and precision measurement of radio source strengths. He is best known for his part in the discovery in 1964 of the 3~K cosmic black body background radiation, thought to have originated in the early stages of the expansion of the universe. In 1970 he and his co-workers extended radio spectroscopy of the interstellar medium to short millimeter wavelengths where they discovered a number of interstellar molecules including Carbon Monoxide. His work in the resulting field of molecular cloud astronomy has been concentrated on the structure of nearby molecular clouds with interpretations based on observations of several molecular species in each region. He has also applied astronomical techniques to the measurement of earth-space propagation for satellite communication at centimeter and infrared wavelengths and made infrared propagation measurements along a terrestrial path. His most recent work at Bell Labs was in wireless communications and optical networking and resulted in a number of patents. He is a co-recipient of the Henry Draper Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Science and the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society, London and the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a member of the American Astronomical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Astronomical Union, the International Union of Radio Science, the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, The American Philosophical Society, and was a member of the 1990 Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee (Bahcall Committee).
 
Election Year
2009[X]
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