Subdivision
• | 101. Astronomy |
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| • | 105. Physical Earth Sciences |
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| • | 106. Physics |
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| • | 107 |
(1)
| • | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology |
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| • | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology |
(1)
| • | 207. Genetics |
(1)
| • | 208. Plant Sciences |
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| • | 209. Neurobiology |
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| • | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology |
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| • | 302. Economics |
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| • | 303. History Since 1715 |
(2)
| • | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science |
(2)
| • | 305 |
(1)
| • | 401. Archaeology |
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| • | 402a |
(1)
| • | 402b |
(1)
| • | 404a |
(1)
| • | 404b |
(1)
| • | 406. Linguistics |
(2)
| • | 501. Creative Artists |
(1)
| • | 502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions |
(3)
| • | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors |
(3)
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| 1 | Name: | Dr. Leslie C. Aiello | | Institution: | Wenner-Gren Foundation; University College London | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | Leslie Aiello served as President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation of Anthropological Research, a private international foundation devoted to the support of broad-based anthropological research, from 2005 to 2017. She is currently President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Her academic interests focus on the evolution of human adaptation as well as on the broader issues of evolutionary theory, life history and the evolution of the brain and cognition. She is perhaps best known for the introduction of the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (with Peter Wheeler), which addresses energetic trade-offs in the evolution of the human brain.
She received her BA and MA in Anthropology from the University of California (Los Angeles) and her PhD in human evolution and anatomy from the University of London. She spent the majority of her 30-year academic career at University College London where she was Professor of Biological Anthropology (1995-2005), Head of the UCL Anthropology Department (1996-2002), and Head of the UCL Graduate School (2002-2005). She also served as the co-managing editor of the Journal of Human Evolution (1993-1999), has been the primary supervisor for 23 PhD students, has published books and a number of articles in academic journals and has been active with the media in the public dissemination of science and particularly human evolution.
She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. She has served as an officer for a number of anthropological and scientific societies and as a consultant and advisor to a variety of international anthropological institutions and initiatives. She was the 2006 Huxley Memorial Medalist and Lecturer, received an Honorary Fellowship from University College London (2007), was awarded the ‘2007 Musa Urania (Science) from the city of Florence, Italy, and in 2018 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. She is also Professor Emerita (Biological Anthropology) at University College London. Leslie Aiello was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
2 | Name: | Dr. Eshel Ben-Jacob | | Institution: | Tel Aviv University; Rice University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | Residency: | International | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1952 | | Death Date: | June 5, 2015 | | | | | Eshel Ben-Jacob was a professor of Physics and Astronomy, Maguy-Glass Prof. in Physics of Complex Systems and Member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He was also an Adjunct Prof. of Biosciences and Senior Investigator at the Center of Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) at Rice University. Prof. Ben-Jacob finished his PhD in Physics (1982) at Tel Aviv University, during which he investigated the nonlinear dynamics and noise effects in networks of superconductors. He spent three years (1981-1984) as a post doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP; today KITP) at the University of California Santa Barbara and made his first groundbreaking work during that time. He and his collaborators solved the long standing "snowflake" problem, formulated by Kepler back in 1610, and lay the foundations of self-organization and pattern formation in open systems far from equilibrium - a field he pioneered and in which he made several breakthroughs (e.g., comprehending the singular interplay between the micro and macro level dynamics, formulating new self-consistent selection principles, founding a new theory of morphology selection). At the same time, Ben-Jacob suggested and showed, theoretically and experimentally, that Coulomb effect can be utilized to control single electron quantum tunneling in sub-micron systems. This led him to the invention (1988) of a transistor operating by single electron tunneling. He was awarded the Landau Prize for research in 1986. Ben-Jacob continued to study quantum effects in small systems, predicting (in the 90s) that flux solitons can behave as quantum relativistic particles.
Enthralled by the even greater challenge posed by self-organization in living systems, Ben-Jacob embarked on a new direction of applying physics principles and investigation methods to biology. His first and ongoing effort was bacterial colony development, believing that the foundations of cognition are rooted in these most fundamental life forms - in their abilities to assess the environment, process the information they sense, and adapt accordingly. Among his achievements in the last two decades in physical microbiology were revealing the principles of self organization in bacterial colonies and of collective decision making by social bacteria.
While continuing to work on bacteria, Ben-Jacob turned to apply what he learned there to studies of neural network organization and task performance. Here, his most noticeable accomplishment was the first imprinting of multiple memories in live neuronal networks outside the brain utilizing his new "functional holography" analysis of the network activity. Being recognized as a revolutionary step in Networks Neuroscience, this endeavor was selected by Scientific American as one of the 50 most important achievements in all fields of science and technology in 2007. Ben-Jacob then utilized the "functional holography" method for analyzing recorded human brain activity with application to epilepsy. He applied his methods in clinical studies of brain repair from stroke and traumatic brain injuries by hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Ben-Jacob's last endeavor was applying what he learned from the microbial world in cancer research. Here he promoted the idea that cancer cells, like bacteria, use advanced communication and cooperation through which they migrate, colonize new organs, develop drug resistance, deceive the immune system and enslave stromal cells. In line of this paradigm, he worked on revealing the operational principles underlying these lethal traits and developing a new theoretical framework to studying new classes of therapeutic strategies intended to defeat cancer by means of "cyberwar", i.e. targeting its communication, cooperation and control.
Prof. Ben-Jacob served as vice president (1998-2001) and President (2001-2004) of the Israel Physical Society. He was granted the award of Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella della solidarietà Italiana for promotion of science and science culture (2008). He was awarded the Weizmann prize in Physical Sciences in 2013 for "innovative application of physical methods to the study of biological communities such as bacteria colonies, neural networks, and tumors" and inducted an International member of the American Philosophical Society in mathematical and physical sciences in 2014. He died on June 5, 2015, in Tel Aviv, Israel, at the age of 63. | |
3 | Name: | Dr. Ruth Schwartz Cowan | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | Ruth Schwartz Cowan is an historian of science, technology and medicine, with degrees from Barnard College (BA), the University of California at Berkeley (MA) and The Johns Hopkins University (PhD).
She was a member of the History Department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1967 to 2002, attaining the rank of Professor in 1984. Between 1997 and 2002 she was the Chair of the Honors College at SUNY-Stony Brook; she also served as Director of Women's Studies from 1985-1990. She became Professor Emerita at Stony Brook in 2002.
In July, 2002 she became Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Between 2003 and 2008 and again in 2011-2012 she was Chair of the Department. She became Professor Emerita at Penn in July, 2012.
Professor Cowan is the author of six books and numerous articles. Her books are: Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Harvard University Press, 2008); The Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); (with Neil M. Cowan) Our Parents' Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1989) [revised second edition published as Our Parent's Lives: Everyday Life and Jewish Assimilation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996)]; Sir Francis Galton and the Study of Heredity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Garland Press, 1985); and More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
With Daniel J Kevles and Peter Westwick she has recently begun a commissioned sesquicentennial history of the National Academy of Science. Currently, she is also working on a revision (for 2016) of her textbook, A Social History of American Technology.
Professor Cowan has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. She has had grants in support of her research from the Sloan Foundation, NSF, NEH, NIH (through ELSI) and the ACLS.
Professor Cowan has been awarded the Leonardo daVinci Medal and the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology as well as the J.D. Bernal Prize of the Society for the Social Study of Science. She was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2014.
Professor Cowan is active in the Society for the History of Technology (President,1992-1994). She serves on the editorial boards of Social Studies of Science and Science and Culture. She has been a member of the Smithsonian Council, and of the IEEE History Committee. For several years she was the Chair of the US National Committee, International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science, a member of the Visiting Committee for the Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Trustee of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. She is a founding board member of the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) and is currently the Chair of the Research Community Advisory Board, North Shore/LIJ Hospital System on Long Island. | |
4 | Name: | Sir Angus Deaton | | Institution: | Princeton University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 302. Economics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | Angus Deaton is Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University where he has taught for more than thirty years. In March 2017 he was appointed Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. He is the author of five books including, most recently, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was educated there, in the Scottish borders, and at Cambridge University. He taught at the University of Bristol, where he was Professor of Econometrics, from 1976 to 1983. Over the years, his interests have included consumer behavior, econometrics, health, development, poverty, inequality, and wellbeing. His book with John Muellbauer, Economics and Consumer Behavior, has been a basic reference since its publication in 1980. His 1997 book, The Analysis of Household Surveys, is widely used by researchers in economic development. He has consulted for the World Bank, on poverty measurement and on international comparisons, and for the Gallup Organization, exploring global and national links between life evaluation, hedonic wellbeing, income and health. He was the first recipient of the Econometric Society’s Frisch Medal, and was Editor of Econometrica in the 1980s. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was President of the American Economic Association in 2009. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Rome, London, St Andrews, Edinburgh, and Cyprus. In 2012, he won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in recognition of his life’s work. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. In 2015 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare. In 2016 he was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours list. | |
5 | Name: | Dr. Susan T. Fiske | | Institution: | Princeton University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 305 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | Susan T. Fiske was Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University, becoming Emerita in 2023. (Ph.D., Harvard University; honorary doctorates, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands; Universität Basel, Switzerland). She investigates social cognition, especially cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, and neuro-scientific levels. Author of over 300 publications and winner of numerous scientific awards, she has most recently been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her just-published book is The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies (with Chris Malone, 2013). Sponsored by a Guggenheim, her 2011 Russell-Sage-Foundation book is Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us. With Shelley Taylor, she has written four editions of a classic text: Social Cognition (2013, 4/e). Currently an editor of Annual Review of Psychology, PNAS, and Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, she is also President of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Her graduate students arranged for her to win the University’s Mentoring Award. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. In 2017 she was awarded the Wilhelm Wundt - William James Award. | |
6 | Name: | Dr. Inez Y. Fung | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | Inez Fung's research focuses on climate change and the global carbon cycle. Her work in climate modeling predicts the co-evolution of carbon dioxide and climate and concludes that the diminishing capacities of the land and oceans to store carbon act to accelerate global warming.
A native of Hong Kong, Inez Fung received her S.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Sc.D. in Meteorology from MIT. After her NRC postdoctoral fellowship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, she was affiliated with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and the University of Victoria in Canada. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Berekely in 1998 and is a Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Among her numerous honors are Fellowship in the American Meteorological Society and of the American Geophysical Union; the Roger Revelle Medal of the American Geophysical Union; membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and Academia Sinica (Taiwan); and the 2019 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society. She was a contributing author to the Assessment Reports of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.
Fung is a subject in a biography series for middle-school readers "Women's Adventure in Science" launched by the National Academy of Sciences. The title of her biography is "Forecast Earth." | |
7 | Name: | Ms. Louise Gluck | | Institution: | Yale University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1943 | | Death Date: | October 13, 2023 | | | | | Louise Gluck is the author of Firstborn, 1968; Proofs and Theories (Collected Essays), 1994; The First Four Books, 1995; Meadowlands, 1996; Vita Nova, 1999; The Seven Ages, 2001; October, 2003; Averno, 2006; A Village Life, 2009; Poems, 1962-2012, 2012. Each of her books departs from the theme of its predecessors like a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. Myths of antiquity - the characters of Persphone, Achilles, Eurydice, Iphigenia, appear throughout the series, often used as a vehicle for psychological analysis. Many of her books contain dark poems of family relationships. The last volume, A Village Life, reinforces the themes that delineate the difficulties of interpersonal relationships. To read her books is to understanding the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.
She is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, 1985; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1975, 1987; Pulitzer Prize, 1993; the PEN Martha Albrand Award, 1994, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015; and the National Humanities Medal, 2016. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003.
Louise Gluck was Senior lecturer in English, 1984-98, and Preston S. Parish ‘41 Third Century Lecturer in English, 1998-2004, at Williams College, and was Regents Professor, 1985-87, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2004 she has been the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence and Adjunct Professor of English at Yale University.
Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
8 | Name: | Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon | | Institution: | Washington University School of Medicine | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | Jeffrey Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his A.B. from Oberlin College and his M.D. from the University of Chicago. He joined the Washington University faculty after completing his clinical training in internal medicine and gastroenterology, and doing post-doctoral research at the NIH. He was Head of the Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology from 1991-2004 before becoming the founding Director of a University-wide, Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology. His lab’s interdisciplinary studies of the genomic and metabolic foundations of mutually beneficial host-microbial relationships in the human gut have helped create a new field of research that focuses on understanding of the role of our microbial communities in shaping postnatal development, health status and disease predispositions.
Gordon's work has provided an extended view of ourselves as a composite of species from all three domains of life, where genes in our gut microbial community genomes (microbiomes) endow us with attributes we have not had to evolve on our own. His group has developed new experimental and computational approaches to characterize the assembly and dynamic operations of human gut communities; this work has involved studies of gnotobiotic animal models, twins concordant or discordant for physiologic phenotypes, and children and adults representing diverse geographic, cultural and socio-economic conditions. A central issue he and his students have addressed and continue to pursue is how our gut microbiomes contribute to obesity and to childhood undernutrition. Their findings concerning how our gut microbiomes determine the metabolic, physiologic and immunologic effects of the various foods we consume are altering the way healthy diets can be defined, providing new views of how our changing lifestyles impact health, revealing how functional maturation of the microbiome is related to healthy growth of infants and children, and helping to usher in a new era of microbiome-directed therapeutics. Gordon has been the research mentor to 120 PhD and MD/PhD students and post-doctoral fellows since he established his lab at Washington University. Recently, working with colleagues in Bangladesh, Gordon has developed therapeutic foods designed to support and nurture the development of a healthy gut microbiome in the first few years of life. A new therapeutic food was shown to repair defective microbial community development in children with malnutrition and restore their growth toward a normal trajectory.
Jeffrey Gordon is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is the recipient of the Robert Koch Award from the Koch Foundation, the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences, the Passano Laureate Award from the Passano Foundation, and the Dickson Prize in Medicine. In 2015 he was awarded the Keio Medical Science Prize, in 2017 the Horwitz Prize and the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur International Award, in 2018 the British Royal Society's Copley Medal, and in 2021 the Kober Medal and the Balzan Prize. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
9 | Name: | Dr. Robert Haselkorn | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | | | Robert Haselkorn bio for APS:
I was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1934 in a house built by my mother’s father, a carpenter/contractor who had emigrated from Vilnius in Lithuania around the turn of the 20th century. My father’s father emigrated around the same time, from somewhere in Galicia. I attended PS 197 a short walk from home and moved on to James Madison High School, also walking distance from home. My mother was a math teacher at Madison before I was born. She moved to a different school, Midwood, when I was very young but many of her friends were still there when I started, so I was always comfortable there. A large cohort of friends from PS 197 accompanied me so that even though the school had 6,000 students (!) we enjoyed a substantial degree of security. Many of the teachers were superb, especially in math, English, French and history.
Reviewing the facts of my history it seems to be filled with accidents that, in retrospect, have had very large consequences. The first one I recall is my choice of colleges. One afternoon, when I was a junior in high school, I watched a half-hour television program about Princeton. It described, in ten-minute segments, what it was like to study science, humanities or social studies at Princeton. That sealed it for me. I applied, was accepted, matriculated. The application required a choice of “interest”. I put down chemistry. That steered me to Clark Bricker as advisor during orientation week. His choice of courses made me a chem major. Driven into the arms of Arthur Tobolsky, a polymer chemist, and then Walter Kauzmann, the best teacher in the universe, I was guided firmly to Harvard and the laboratory of Paul Doty for graduate work.
The Doty lab was a wonderful place to learn about the physical properties of proteins and nucleic acids. Best of all, my desk and workbench were placed between those of Helga Boedtker (Doty’s wife) and Ben Hall, an experienced graduate student who went on to become a star at the U of Washington. Ben developed cloning in yeast and holds the patent on production of hepatitis vaccine in yeast. In addition, Doty had persuaded Marianne Grunberg-Manago to spend a few months as a visitor. Marianne had discovered the enzyme polynucleotide phosphorylase, with which it was possible for me to synthesize polyA, polyU, polyC and polyI. My thesis described the physical characterization of those four polymers and their complexes. Those studies provided the basis for exploration of secondary structure in RNA, still being quoted nearly 50 years later, and related work by Noboru Sueoka leading to discovery of the dependence of the melting temperature of DNA on its content of GC base pairs.
Another digression for accidents. When I started my graduate career at Harvard I registered for a room in one of the graduate dorms near the chem labs. I spent exactly one night there. The next day I encountered a friend from Princeton who had completed a year at Harvard Law School. He asked me where I was living. It turned out that he and other law students had secured a large house almost on the Harvard quadrangle that, by a quirk, had just obtained a free bedroom for which a new member of their cartel was needed. Was I interested? In less than an hour I was out of the noisy dorm and into the Lawyers House. This is just the first accident. The second occurred around January. This takes close watching of the chain of events. Another of the House Lawyers was engaged. His fiancée had a friend whose younger sister was a student at Wheelock College, across the river in Boston. Fiancee invited the sister of her friend to dinner. Fiancee asked the sister if she was interested in meeting a graduate student at Harvard, living in the House with her fiancée. Sister agreed. Information was transferred to me, a phone call was made, a date was arranged, and after suitable meetings etc we were married in June of 1957. Two children, four grandchildren and 57 years later Margot and I are still happily together. Some accident.
Jim Watson joined the Harvard faculty about the time I started in the Doty lab. Jim became a very useful member of my thesis committee. When I was finishing the thesis, Doty advised me to write to Francis Crick about a postdoc, which I did. In about two weeks (no email then) Francis replied that they could not take me due to lack of space. I was crushed, Doty was abroad, so I took the letter to Jim. He said not to worry, that the Cavendish was too crowded anyway, why not write to Roy Markham at the plant virus lab in Cambridge. I did that and Roy replied immediately, with a full description of the facilities and the availability of plants and viruses and analytical equipment and colleagues. So I wrote a proposal to the American Cancer Society to determine the RNA sequences of plant viruses (successful), defended the thesis, and sailed for England with Margot and 9-month-old Deborah. We had rented, sight unseen, a house in the suburb of Chesterton belonging to an English biochemist, who was living in Seattle for a while.
The adventures that filled our two years in Cambridge are a separate story. We enjoyed outstanding parties at the Markham house from beginning to end as well as outstanding science at the virus research unit with Roy himself, Maurice Rees, David Dunn, Graham Hills and visitors Bob Symons, David Lipton from Wash U in St. Louis and Mel Simpson still at Yale. I could take advantage of the proximity of downtown Cambridge, with Sydney Brenner, Francis Crick and Fred Sanger before they moved away to the far south end of town. My two accomplishments were simple: demonstration that the RNA prepared from turnip yellow mosaic virus was infectious in Chinese cabbage plants and that said RNA could serve as messenger RNA in a cell-free protein synthesizing system from E. coli.
The latter experiments were carried out with Jim Ofengand in the Cavendish, in the spring of 1961. The timing was not great, because Marshall Nirenberg was doing similar experiments with TMV RNA at the NIH at the same time. He did a control experiment consisting of replacing the viral RNA with polyU, expecting to see nothing made. Instead, he saw polyphenylalanine, which he immediately realized opened the door to deciphering the genetic code. That was not the best time for me to be setting up a new lab, but that is what we had to do. Where?
Time for another accident. The Doty lab produced a large number of scholars trained in the physical chemistry of nucleic acids. Two of them, Stuart Rice and Peter Geiduschek, had already achieved positions of responsibility at the University of Chicago. They knew me socially from meetings at Harvard. Stuart was on leave during the year 1960-61 and he spent that year as a visitor in Chemistry at Cambridge, England. One day I was cycling down the Kings Parade in Cambridge and I literally ran into Stuart. No harm. He asked me what I was doing and then what plans I had for the future. Then he described the program in biophysics in Chicago and arranged for a visit for me, including Peter Geiduschek. If not for the random collision with Stuart, I surely would have started my academic career somewhere else. As it happened, Ray Zirkle provided a fabulous offer in biophysics that placed me next to the labs of Ed Taylor and Peter Geiduschek, with outstanding students and superb equipment. Ed Taylor has been in the same department with me more or less continuously, missing only a few years he worked in London. Stuart Rice and Steve Berry have been in the Chemistry Dept for more than 50 years, as have I. And with my election to the APS, all four of us are members of the three societies: the National Academy, the American Academy and the APS.
My career in Chicago started in the Committee on Biophysics, whose name was changed to Department of Biophysics, then merged with the Department of Theoretical Biology. In 1984 there was a major reorganization creating two new departments, Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. I was appointed in both, as well as in Chemistry. Graduate programs in biophysics rose and fell according to the whims of NIH. Ours thrived for my first 20 years in Chicago, then fell and disappeared in 1984, then was resurrected for another decade, then disappeared and finally came back under a new program in chemistry and biochemistry. Currently it is thriving. As my research program concentrated more on cellular differentiation in nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, I gravitated to microbiology and genomics.
Much of my success in science has been due to the students, undergraduate, graduate and postdoc, who chose to work in my lab. To be sure, some of these choices were accidental. For example, my first graduate student, David DeRosier, apparently chose my lab as a result of a single lecture I gave in a biochemistry course, in which I described how the optical system worked in the analytical ultracentrifuge. Here is the accident: when I was a graduate student I took the Physiology course at the MBL in Woods Hole. That year, the course included a week of centrifugation taught by Howard Schachman, a spirited and thorough teacher. His example stayed with me and DeRosier was the beneficiary. So was I. DeRosier did his thesis on the structure of Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus, which I brought with me from Cambridge. That project led to confirmation of an aspect of the model proposed by Don Caspar and Aaron Klug for the structures of spherical viruses. DeRosier proceeded to a postdoc with Klug and the invention of a method for reconstruction of structures from electron micrographs. Of great importance also, DeRosier brought into the lab his friend Bill Shipp, my second student, who produced a slender thesis with two chapters. The first described a double-stranded RNA intermediate in the replication of Tobacco Mosaic Virus in tobacco leaves. The second described DNA in tobacco chloroplasts, which Bill found accidentally as a contaminant in his RNA preparations. Bill’s work was followed closely by another student working on mitochondria in embryonic chicken liver, John Sinclair. Using our ultracentrifuge and Bill’s methods, John showed that the mitochondria contained DNA, readily differentiated from nuclear DNA.
Plant viruses are difficult to study in one respect: the ratio of physical particles to lesions on plants is very high, so it is impossible to correlate physical properties with biological consequences. Frank Stahl urged me to take the phage course at Cold Spring Harbor, which I did, for two purposes. One was to learn how to handle RNA phages, which produced one plaque per physical particle. The other was to learn about the famous DNA phage T4, whose genetics was already extremely advanced. Back in Chicago I had some difficulty with the RNA phages but the T4 work focused on protein synthesis and was reasonably productive. This program was interrupted by a discovery made by Robert Safferman in Ohio: he found the first virus that grew on a cyanobacterial host. We obtained the phage from him and started a collaboration that introduced standard phage techniques into his studies, eventually yielding information about the structure, replication, assembly and contribution of these viruses to photosynthesis in the hosts. Graduate students Ron Luftig, Lou Sherman and Ken Adolph did this work between 1963 and 1970. Ken discovered his own phage in Lake Mendota, a significant discovery because the host organism was Anabaena, an organism that carried out nitrogen fixation, the conversion of N2 to ammonia. Much of our work post-1970 was with Anabaena.
Ken’s thesis described a beautiful virus he discovered and named N-1. When Honoree Fleming joined the lab I thought she would continue work on virus development. But she wanted to study cellular development, specifically the development of heterocysts. This system involved the conversion of an oxygen-evolving cell carrying out green plant photosynthesis into an anaerobic factory carrying out nitrogen fixation. This differentiation involves controlling the expression of 1500 of the 7000 genes in the genome of Anabaena. Eventually this system was studied by students Jean Lang, Jim Orr, George Schneider, Christopher Bauer, Kristen Black , Kay Jones and Doug Rice as well as postdocs Barbara Mazur, Jim Golden, Steve Robinson, Nilgun Tumer, Stephanie Curtis, Sandra Nierzwickie-Bauer, Bianca Brahamsha, Brian Palenik, Martin Mulligan, Dulal Borthakur, Bill Belknap, Sean Callahan, Zi Ye, Amin Nasser and Bill Buikema.
Jim Golden joined my lab as the spouse of Susan Golden, who had chosen to work with me after doing her graduate work with Lou Sherman at the U of Missouri on transformation of Synechococcus. Genetic systems had just been introduced to study photosynthesis, in the early 1980s. Among those systems were studies of the genes encoding components of the photochemical reaction centers, in particular those affected by herbicides. Susan Golden was able to show that one set of herbicides worked by binding to a protein component of the PSII reaction center. With grad student Judy Brusslan in Chicago she continued this work in her position at Texas A&M. At one point their results on transcription of the genes encoding the pabA protein did not agree. Sorting out their differences led to Susan’s discovery of the circadian clock in cyanobacteria.
Jim Golden was also studying transcription in our lab. He worked out a method to extract RNA from heterocysts, the thick-walled cells in which nitrogen was reduced to ammonia. Among the RNA he found some DNA, which he examined with restriction enzymes and discovered that the region containing the genes encoding nitrogenase, the nif genes, was rearranged with respect to the same genes in vegetative cells. Further work showed that one of the nif genes was interrupted by a large DNA element that had to be excised, during heterocyst development, to allow proper transcription of that gene. In his own lab at Texas A&M, Golden went on to discover additional examples of DNA elements interrupting nif genes, that had to be excised during heterocyst development.
This work was done in the early 1980s. Subsequently, Bill Buikema joined the lab and he set out to establish a system of genetic analysis in the cyanobacterium Anabaena. Following leads from Peter Wolk at Michigan State, Buikema succeeded in isolating a large number of mutants unable to differentiate nitrogen-fixing heterocysts. He succeeded in isolating DNA that contained the genes mutated in each mutant, then determined the DNA sequence of both the wild-type and the mutant gene. We still use his mutant collection to study transport mechanisms that send the sugar sucrose from vegetative cells into heterocysts to power nitrogen fixation and at the same time send arginine, a downstream product of nitrogen fixation, from the heterocysts into vegetative cells so the latter can grow and divide.
Genetic studies of cyanobacteria did not get moving until the 1980s. Photosynthesis could be studied also in the purple bacteria, for some of whom there was a defective virus called GTA that could package and transfer DNA from one cell to another. These particles could carry genes, so they became the basis for a genetic system. We started with postdocs Rob Jones and Pablo Scolnik, grad student Peter Avtges, and then Robert Kranz. Kranz made major contributions, is now at Wash U in St. Louis. In the 1990s an exodus began from the USSR, with Michael Fonstein, Tanya Nikolskaya, Olga Zagnitko, Anna Lapidus and Yasha Kohen all contributing to the program to determine the genome sequence of Rhodobacter capsulatus. At the time, companies were being formed to determine bacterial genome sequences for clients who could and did pay $5 million for a complete DNA sequence. (Today that job takes a few days, at somewhat lower cost.)
We purchased, with NSF funds, one of the first wave of ABI DNA sequenators. Part of the cost was covered by the U of Chicago, for which we provided a subsidized DNA sequencing service to others. Every attempt to get support for the Rhodobacter sequencing project from NSF or DOE was turned down. We established a collaboration with a team in Prague, headed by Vaclav Paces, who had been a postdoc with me in 1968. This worked well and we were able to publish together the first 189,000 base pairs of the sequence, which included all the genes required for the synthesis of cobalamin, a complex structure that comprised an important vitamin. But the complete chromosome contained 3,400,000 base pairs, so it was clear we had much to do. Without outside support it took almost 15 years! The final complete sequence was published just a few years ago with authors from the lab in Prague, my lab in Chicago, and a few scattered former employees of Integrated Genomics in Chicago.
For the past 25 years we have been able to run three small programs at the same time. One was the study of the chromosome of Rhodobacter, the second the differentiation of heterocysts in cyanobacteria, focusing on transcription in heterocysts as well as the connections between heterocysts and vegetative cells, and the third a study of the enzyme acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), which catalyzes the first step in fatty acid biosynthesis.
The ACC program began with the idea that we could use herbicides that target the fatty acid pathway to analyze that pathway, similar to the use of antibiotics that target the ribosome to study protein synthesis. With postdoc Piotr Gornicki, we first examined the cyanobacterium Anabaena, discovering to our regret that Anabaena is resistant to the herbicide called haloxyfop and others that target ACC in plants. Much later we learned that all bacteria are resistant to these herbicides because all bacterial ACC are comprised of four separate subunits, none of which bind these herbicides. Indeed, as many others and we discovered, only grasses (monocots) were killed by the herbicides, while all dicots were resistant. This difference is due to the fact that all plants have a unique ACC in their chloroplasts. In the case of grasses the evolutionary path is via duplication of the gene for a multifunctional large protein. The ACC encoded by this gene is sensitive to haloxyfop. In dicots, the chloroplast ACC is encoded by four genes derived from bacteria and that enzyme is resistant to haloxyfop.
Gornicki and his lab-mates worked all this out doing classical biochemistry, but attempts at doing genetic studies were stymied. Wheat was a suitable grass for biochemistry, but transformation experiments with DNA took about two years in wheat. We decided to transfer the whole system to yeast, which took some time to bring into the lab. Eventually, with help from Gela Tevzadze (an expert) and Marcin Joachimiak (a bright undergraduate) we were able to adapt yeast to analyse the ACC gene from any source: first the wheat chloroplast and cytoplasmic ACC genes, then the ACC genes of parasites such as Toxoplasma, Leishmania and others, and finally the human isoforms ACC1 and ACC2, the latter being one that controls fatty acid degradation in mitochondria, possibly a key to controlling obesity in humans. | |
10 | Name: | Dr. John G. Hildebrand | | Institution: | University of Arizona; National Academy of Sciences | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | John G. Hildebrand earned his A.B. degree (magna cum laude, in biology) at Harvard University and Ph.D. degree (in biochemistry) at The Rockefeller University. After serving as a member of the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School (1969-1980) and the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University (1980-85), he moved to the University of Arizona in Tucson as founding head of the Division of Neurobiology (1985-2009) and subsequently the Department of Neuroscience (2009-2013, after the Division became a Department in the College of Science). He currently is Regents Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Entomology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology and Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences. His research fields are insect neurobiology and behavior, olfaction, chemical ecology, and vector biology, and he is an author of more than 215 peer-reviewed research papers and reviews and an editor of five books. His multidisciplinary, pioneering research endeavor has yielded numerous discoveries and insights about the functional organization and development of, and neural mechanisms of sensory information processing in, the olfactory systems of insects and their roles in mate-seeking and interactions with hosts. A past president of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (2002-03), International Society of Chemical Ecology (1998-99), and International Society for Neuroethology (1995-98), he also has served as a trustee of The Rockefeller University (1970-73) and The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (1982-89) and as a Councilor of the National Academy of Sciences (2012-15). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences 'Leopoldina’, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. An Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society (UK) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Entomological Society of America, and the International Society for Neuroethology, he was granted an honorary degree (Laurea honoris causa) by the Universitá degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy, in 2000. Among his other honors have been MERIT and Javits Awards from NIH (1986), R.H. Wright Award in Olfactory Research (1990), Max Planck Research Award of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (1990), Founders Memorial Award of the Entomological Society of America (1997), IFF Award for Innovative Research in the Chemoreception Sciences (1997), Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1997), Lifetime Achievement Award of the Diversity Program in Neuroscience from the American Psychological Association (2006), Silver Medal of the International Society of Chemical Ecology (2006), Outstanding Service Award for Contributions to the Biological Sciences from the American Institute of Biological Sciences (2006), Einstein Professorship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2008), and the Max Mozell Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Chemical Senses from the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (2012). He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
11 | Name: | Dr. Julia Hirschberg | | Institution: | Columbia University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 107 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and also has a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. She worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories -- Research from 1985-2003 as a Member of Technical Staff and a Department Head, creating the Human-Computer Interface Research Department. She served as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics from 1993-2003 and co-editor-in-chief of Speech Communication from 2003-2006 and is now on the Editorial Board. She was on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) from 1993-2003, on the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) since 1996, and on the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 1999-2007 (as President 2005-2007, Advisory Council 2007--). She now serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the Executive Board of the Computing Research Associate (CRA), the Association for the Advancement of Artifical Intelligence (AAAI) Council, the Executive Board of the North American ACL, and the board of the CRA-W. She has been active in working for diversity at AT&T and at Columbia. She has been an AAAI fellow since 1994, an ISCA Fellow since 2008, and a (founding) ACL Fellow since 2011. She received an Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktor) from KTH in 2007, a Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (CESAA) Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award in 2009, the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2011, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2011, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
12 | Name: | Dr. Pierre Hohenberg | | Institution: | New York University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1934 | | Death Date: | December 15, 2017 | | | | | Pierre Hohenberg received his PhD from Harvard University in 1962. After postdoctoral positions in Moscow and Paris he was a staff member at Bell Laboratories until 1995. During the period 1974-1977 he was also a professor of Physics at the Technical University in Munich. From 1995 to 2004 he served as Deputy Provost for Science and Technology at Yale University. In 2004 he moved to NYU as the Senior Vice Provost for Research, until 2010, when he joined the Department of Physics as professor. He became emeritus in 2013. Hohenberg's principal areas of scholarship included condensed matter physics, statistical
physics, non-equilibrium phenomena and the foundations of quantum
mechanics and the philosophy of science. He was particularly well-known as one of the originators of Density Functional Theory and of the Dynamical Scaling Theory of critical phenomena.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Physical Society, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the recipient of the Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics, the Max Planck Medaille of the German Physical Society and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society. In addition, he served on numerous advisory committees to universities, federal agencies, and national and international professional organizations. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. Pierre Hohenberg died December 15, 2017, at the age of 84. | |
13 | Name: | Dr. Robert Jervis | | Institution: | Columbia University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | Birth Date: | 1940 | | Death Date: | December 9, 2021 | | | | | Robert Jervis is Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University. His most recent book is Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Cornell University Press, 2010). His System Effects: Complexity in Political Life (Princeton University Press, 1997) was a co-winner of the APSA's Psychology Section Best Book Award, and The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1989) won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is also the author of Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976), The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 1970; 2d ed., Columbia University Press, 1989), The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Cornell University Press, 1984), American Foreign Policy in a New Era (Routledge, 2005). He was President of the American Political Science Association in 2000-01 and has received career achievement awards from the International Society of Political Psychology and ISA's Security Studies Section. In 2006 he received the National Academy of Science’s tri-annual award for behavioral sciences contributions to avoiding nuclear war. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978-79 and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 2018 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He chairs the Historical Review Panel for CIA and is a National Intelligence Council associate. His current research includes the nature of beliefs, IR theory and the Cold War, and the links between signaling and perception. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
14 | Name: | Dr. Susan W. Kieffer | | Institution: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | Susan W. Kieffer became Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2013, where she had served as Center for Advanced Study Professor of Geology and Physics, Walgreen University Chair, and affiliate faculty member in Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2000. After she received a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology she was assistant professor of geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1973-79, a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, 1979-90, professor of geology, 1989-91, and Regents' Professor of Geology, 1991-93, at Arizona State University, and professor of geological sciences and head of geological sciences at the University of British Columbia, 1993-95. In 1995 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and co-founded Kieffer & Woo, Inc. the following year.
Susan Kieffer pursues an eclectic mix of research in geophysical fluid dynamics. Phenomena she has investigated range from rapids in the Grand Canyon, to supersonic volcanic eruptions, to the mysterious workings of the Old Faithful geyser, to the jet of water vapor erupting from Enceladus, to plumes of volcanic ash and gas. All these systems have complex fluid dynamics as a key part of the problem, but each one of them required synthesis of concepts reaching beyond fluid dynamics. Kieffer has been very creative and fearless in attacking these various problems and finding the various tools needed to solve them. She developed a theory for predicting the thermodynamic properties of minerals, work that earned her the Mineralogical Society of America’s award for distinguished work in mineralogy. More recently, she has focused on Earth-related disasters. Her book, The Dynamics of Disaster, and blog, "Geology in Motion," bring the relevant science to a wide audience and also provide thoughtful consideration of the impacts on society of rare yet cataclysmic events.
Susan Kieffer was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1988. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
15 | Name: | Mr. Rem Koolhaas | | Institution: | OMA; Harvard University | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | 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? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | |
16 | Name: | Dr. Jill Lepore | | Institution: | Harvard University; The New Yorker | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1966 | | | | | Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about American history, politics, and culture. Lepore's research focuses on the histories of war and violence and of language and literacy. Much of her writing explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. Lepore received a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995. She joined the Harvard History Department in 2003 and was Chair of the History and Literature Program in 2005-10, 2012, and 2014. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching. In 2014, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
She is the author of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), Time magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and winner of the Mark Lynton Prize. Among her other books are The Story of America: Essays on Origins (2012), The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), The Case for the Nation (2019), and If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (2020). Jill Lepore was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
17 | Name: | Dr. Ron Lesthaeghe | | Institution: | Vrije Universiteit, Brussels | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | Residency: | International | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | Ron J. Lesthaeghe (born 1945) earned his license degree (1967) and his PhD (1970) in the Social Sciences at the University of Ghent, and obtained his MA in Sociology (1968) from Brown University. He has been a research associate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University (1971-73), and worked for the Population Council as regional representative for West and Central Africa (1975-76). Since 1971 he has been lecturer and then professor of Demography and Social Science Methodology at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). From 1988 to 1991 he was Dean of the faculty of economics, sociology and political science at that university. Emeritus at the VUB since 2005.
He has been awarded visiting professorships at the Institut des Sciences Politiques de Paris (Colson Chair, 1989-93), the Université Catholique de Louvain (Leclercq Chair, 1996-97), at the University of Antwerp (Belgian Franqui Chair, 1999-2000), and at Harvard University (Erasmus Chair, 2001-02). He is a member of both the Belgian and the Dutch Academies of Science. Served on the Fachbeirat of the Max Planck Institut für Demografie in Rostock, Germany (1999-2004). In 2003 he received the Irene Taueber Award of the Population Association of America (PAA) and the Office of Population Research of Princeton University. Ranked 10th among the most influential demographers in the period 1950-2000 by 637 colleagues responding in CICRED demographers survey (Chasteland et al., 2004). Recipient in 2005 of the quinquenial Ernest-John Solvay Prize of the FWO (highest Belgian Natl. Science Foundation award in the social sciences and humanities). Received the 2008 Life Time Award from the International Union of the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP). Visiting Professor at the Departments of Sociology/Population Studies Centers of the Universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and of California (Irvine).
Since 2010, Ron has been a regular visitor at the Centre d'Estudis Demografics (CED) at the Autonoma university in Barcelona, where he has been collaborating on the project concerning the rise of unmarried cohabitation in the Americas. In 2014, he was elected as foreign member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. (Class 53 - Social & Political Sciences).
Most of his research has been in the various sub-fields of demography: historical, social and economic, and mainly covering populations of Europe and of sub-Saharan Africa. He has also done research in the fields of cultural change in Europe and of ethnic minorities studies. His published work includes books on "The decline of Belgian Fertility" (1977, Princeton Univ. Press), "Child-spacing in Tropical Africa" (1981, Academic Press), "Production and Reproduction in Sub-Sahara Africa" (1989, University of California Press), "Communities and Generations - Turkish and Moroccan Populations in Belgium" (2000,VUB-Press). He edited "Meaning and Choice: Values Orientations and Life Course Decisions" which brings together the results of longitudinal surveys conducted in the US and Western Europe (2002, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, The Hague). He is also editor and co-author of a number of books in Dutch such as: "Demografische Alternatieven voor België" (De Sikkel, 1979), "Diversiteit in Sociale Verandering - Turkse en Marokkaanse Vrouwen in België", (1997, VUB-Press), and "Eerst Optellen, dan Delen - Demografie, Economie en Sociale Zekerheid" (Garant, 1998). | |
18 | Name: | Dr. Jerome J. McGann | | Institution: | University of Virginia; University of California, Berkeley | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | Subdivision: | 402a | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia.
Ph.D., Yale University, 1966. He was Assistant Professor, University of Chicago, 1966-75; Professor, Johns Hopkins University, 1975-80; Dreyfuss Professor of the Humanities at the California Institute of Technology, 1980-86; Commonwealth Professor, University of Virginia, 1986-93; Thomas Holloway Professor of Victorian Studies, Royal Holloway College, University of London, 1999-2002. He has been Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley since 2007.
No one has done as much to guarantee the future of digital Humanities as Jerome McGann. He was President of the Society for Textual Scholarship (1995-97). Dr. McGann is co-founder of the University of Virginia Speculative Computing Laboratory (SPECLAB), Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), and The Ivanhoe Project. His first monumental book on textual theory, in which he developed the idea that one has to treat texts as socialized, came out of his work on the poetry of Byron. His interests rapidly moved in the direction of digital presentation of sources. His Dante Gabriele Rossetti archive at Virginia has been a model as to what it is possible to accomplish, and since setting that up he has been actively involved in all kinds of on-line procedures, of which his NINES project is only the latest manifestation. McGann has been the most important person in this entire area. Whereas others could simply have derived a new perspective from his Byron experience, McGann has used it as a way to rethink the entire editorial enterprise in terms of the web and on-line possibilities. This turns out to be particularly important for writers who were also engaged in art, such as Rossetti or Blake.
He is the author of many books, including: A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983); The Beauty of Inflections, Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985); Social Values and Poetic Acts (1987); The Textual Condition, 1991; Byron and Romanticism, (2002); Radiant Textuality, Literature since the World Wide Web (2004); The Scholar’s Art, Literary Studies in a Managed World (2006); The Poet Edgar Allen Poe: Alien Angel (2014); and A New Republic of Letters: Humanities Scholarship in an Age of Digital Reproduction (2014). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1994. Jerome McGann has been the recipient of many prizes, including the Richard W. Lyman Award for Distinguished Contribution to Humanities Computing, the James Russell Lowell Award from The Modern Language Association, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a Thomas Jefferson Award from the University of Virginia. Jerome McGann was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
19 | Name: | Dr. Michael S. McPherson | | Institution: | Spencer Foundation | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | 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: | 1947 | | | | | Michael S. McPherson, now emeritus, served as the fifth President of the Spencer Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation in 2003 he served as President of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota for seven years. A nationally known economist whose expertise focuses on the interplay between education and economics, McPherson spent the 22 years prior to his Macalester presidency as professor of economics, chairman of the Economics Department, and dean of faculty at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics, an M.A. in Economics, and a Ph.D. in Economics, all from the University of Chicago.
McPherson, who is co-author and editor of several books, including Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities; College Access: Opportunity or Privilege?; Keeping College Affordable; Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy; and was founding co-editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy. He has served as a trustee of the College Board, the American Council on Education and Wesleyan University. He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is currently a trustee of McNally Smith College of Music and the DentaQuest Foundation, as well as President of the Board of Overseers of TIAA-CREF. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
20 | Name: | Dr. Barbara J. Meyer | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute; University of California, Berkeley | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | Residency: | Resident | | Living? : |
Living
| | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | Barbara J. Meyer is Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received a Ph.D. at Harvard University and was an assistant and associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Barbara Meyer is a world leader in the field of chromosome structure and function. As a charter member of the community studying development of the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, she launched her elegant studies of sex determination and X-chromosome dosage compensation. Her work solved a fundamental mystery of developmental: how an organism counts the number of X chromosomes to determine sexual identity. These studies revealed mechanisms by which small quantitative differences in molecular signals dictate alternative developmental fates. Meyer further showed that molecular machines, co-opted from the ancient process of chromosome segregation, bind selectively to both X chromosomes of hermaphrodites to compact X chromosomes, repress transcription by half, and thereby equalize transcription with that from the male’s single X chromosome. Elements of the dosage compensation machinery also function in meiosis to regulate chromosome tethering and recombination along an entire chromosome. Meyer is a major participant in the development of heritable genome editing technologies that have expanded genetic studies beyond traditional model organisms and enabled evolutionary comparisons of diverse biological processes.
Dr. Meyer is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, 1985-87, MERIT Award of the National Institutes of Health, 1995-2005, and the Genetics Society of America Medal, 2010. Lshe was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1995 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2000. Barbara Meyer was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
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