| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Barry R. Bloom | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Barry Bloom's passion has been to relate the cutting edge of biomedical science to the needs of the 85% of the world's people living in resource-poor developing countries. His initial research analyzed the complex mechanisms of the immune response by developing in vitro models, enabling him to discover the first lymphokine or cytokine, non-antibody products of activated lymphocytes that regulate the functions of the immune system and mediate inflammation, tissue damage and resistance to microbial infection. After teaching the first course on immunology in India, he began research on leprosy. With collaborators, he created the first DNA library containing all the genes of the leprosy and the tubercle bacilli, thereby ultimately enabling the complete genomes of these major pathogens of humans to be sequenced. Those libraries and the first monoclonal antibodies produced against these pathogens were given to the World Health Organization (WHO) to distribute free of charge to scientists all over the world, helping to stimulate a global effort against these diseases. He has more recently explored the genetic basis of resistance of experimental animals against tuberculosis which integrates knowledge of the host and pathogen in understanding the disease. When there was a serious increase in tuberculosis in the U.S. in the early 1990s his group established, against conventional wisdom, that active transmission of infection, rather than reactivation of old infections, was an important component of the epidemic. Such transmission required implementation of stringent public health measures. He has worked in an official capacity for the WHO for the past 37 years and has advised the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Sciences and the White House on scientific issues and on international health policies. Dr. Bloom is currently Dean of the Faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Drew Gilpin Faust took office as Harvard University's 28th president on July 1, 2007. A historian of the U.S. Civil War and the American South, Faust is also the Lincoln Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She previously served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001-2007). During her tenure, Faust led Radcliffe's transformation from a college into one of the country's foremost scholarly institutes. Before coming to Radcliffe, Faust was the Annenberg Professor of History and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her lastest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), chronicles the impact of the Civil War's enormous death toll on the lives of nineteenth-century Americans; it was recently the subject to a PBS documentary. Faust has served as a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and she is a member of the educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been president of the Southern Historical Association, vice president of the American Historical Assocation, and executive board member of the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians. She has served on numerous editorial boards and selection committees, including the Pulitzer Prize history jury in 1986, 1990, and 2004. Faust's honors include awards in 1982 and 1996 for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1994, the Society of American Historians in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. She received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master's (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013 she won the Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History. Faust left her role as President in 2017 and become a University Professor at Harvard in January 2019. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Christopher Jencks | | | Institution: | Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
For decades, Christopher Jencks has studied such controversial subjects as economic inequality, race, education and social mobility, and homelessness. His work is meticulously researched, methodologically ingenious, relentlessly logical, and consistently dispassionate. One of the world's most eminent social scientists engaged in policy research, he is perceptive in identifying the causes of social problems and adept in connecting evidence and policy choices. Recently, he has dealt with "paradoxes of welfare reform," the intractability of the black-white test score gap, the contributions of conservative and liberal policies to homelessness and why the United States generates so many low wage jobs. Whatever one's political predispositions, his studies are always illuminating and persuasive. Currently the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Jencks has also taught at Northwestern University (1980-96), and from 1961-63 he served as associate editor of The New Republic. His published works include Inequality (1972); Who Gets Ahead? (1979); Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty and the Underclass (1992); The Homeless (1994); and (with M. Phillips) The Black White Test Score Gap (1998). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1997). | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Samuel O. Thier | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | 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? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Samuel Thier, nationally-known authority on internal medicine, kidney disease, biomedical research, national health policy, and medical education, has reshaped every institution he has led. At Yale University, he raised the status of the academic medicine department chair. As president of the Institute of Medicine (1985-91), he established the institute as an objective and expert source of health policy. As president of Brandeis University (1991-94), he raised the level of intellectual ferment and reclarified the university's mission. As president and CEO of Partners HealthCare System (1997-2002), he has made perhaps his most important contribution in demonstrating that a large, fully-integrated academic health system can provide excellent clinical care while maintaining financial stability and strenghthening research and education programs. Born in New York, Dr. Thier received his M.D. from the State University of New York at Syracuse in 1960. He subsequently worked at Massachusetts General Hospital (1967-69) and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (1969-71) and as vice chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (1971-75) before joining the Yale University School of Medicine as chairman of the department of internal medicine in 1975. From 1994-97 he served as president of Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Thier's many accolades include the John Phillips Memorial Award of the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine (2001) and the Robert H. Williams, M.D., Distinguished Chair of Medicine Award from the Association of Professors of Medicine (2003). He was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1988. | |
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