| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Howard Gardner | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A developmental psychologist by training, he has conducted research and written books in several areas, including developmental psychology, neuropsychology, cognitive science, arts education, structuralism, leadership, intelligence, ethics, creativity, and precollegiate education. Dr. Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists a single general intelligence that can be adequately assessed by psychometric instruments. Part of the original team of researchers at Project Zero when it was established by Nelson Goodman in 1967, Gardner went on to become co-director, then senior director. His research with Project Zero includes The Good Project (formerly the GoodWork Project), which promotes "excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society," and Higher Education in the 20th Century, a large-scale national study of college today. Recently, he and colleagues on The Good Project have been studying the fate of professions during a time of rapid change and enormous market pressures. The recipient of 31 honorary degrees, Dr. Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He is the author of 30 books, notably Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983); the most recent of which are Extraordinary minds: Portraits of exceptional individuals and an examination of our extraordinariness (1997), The disciplined mind: What all students should understand (1999), Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st Century (1999), Changing minds: The art and science of changing our own and other people’s minds (2004), and The App Generation (2013). Among his many awards are the Grawemeyer Award in Education, University of Louisville (1990), Presidential Citation, American Educational Research Association (1996), Presidential Citation, American Psychological Association (1998), George Ledlie Prize, President and Fellows of Harvard College (2000), Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic, Pio Manzù (2001), Prince of Asturias Prize in Social Science (2011), Brock International Prize in Education (2015), and the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award, the premier honor from the American Educational Research Association (2020). | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Stephen Owen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Stephen Owen is widely viewed as the most important scholar-critic of Chinese literature in the West. He is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he was the first specialist in his field to be made a University Professor at Harvard. At a time when understanding China is a major priority for the United States, Dr. Owen has, in a long series of distinguished books and articles, opened the door for Westerners to a new understanding of Chinese literature and culture. Though his specialty is the T'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), he has impressive mastery of the range of Chinese literature over its 2,500 years. His work has been informed by recent Western work in literary theory and by a comparatist perspective. He has paid attention in new ways to Chinese literary theory, for example in Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics. His work shows a remarkable combination of learning, literary sensitivity, and elegance of style, as in the admirable readings of Chinese poetry in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. His magisterial An Anthology of Chinese Literature is an amazing poetic and scholarly accomplishment; almost all of the translations are by Dr. Owen himself, and they bring the translation of Chinese poetry, stories, plays, and essays to a new level of lucidity and literary distinction. His translations and annotations show how Chinese poetry is a genuine tradition, for example in its subtle use, in later poems, of allusions to earlier poems. Though his books are written in English and primarily for Western readers, they have such general importance that many of them have been translated into Chinese and published in China. He has a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish. Without a doubt Dr. Owen has brought Chinese literature within the domain of the comparative study of literature. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Theda Skocpol | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology and formerly Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She also served as Director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard from1999 to 2006. Dr. Skocpol received her B.A. in 1969 from Michigan State University and her Ph.D. in 1975 from Harvard University. In 1996, she served as President of the Social Science History Association, an interdisciplinary professional group; and from 2001-03 she served as President-Elect and then President of the 14,000-member American Political Science Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has been awarded honorary degrees by Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and Amherst College. The author of nine books, nine edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles, Dr. Skocpol is recognized as one of the most cited and widely influential scholars in the modern social sciences; her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, U.S. history, and the study of public policy. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. A leader in historical-institutional and comparative research, Dr. Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). For the past fifteen years, Dr. Skocpol's research has focused on U.S. politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), won five scholarly awards: the J. David Greenstone Award of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association; the Outstanding Book Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, given annually for "the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs"; the 1993 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association; and the 1993 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa, given to honor "a comprehensive study that contributes significantly to historical, philosophical, or religious interpretations of the human condition." Dr. Skocpol's recent books include Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government (1996); Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003, winner of the 2004 Greenstone Award); Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, 2005), What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (with Ariane Liazos and Marshall Ganz, 2007), and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (with Vanessa Williamson, 2012). Active in civic as well as academic life, Dr. Skocpol was included in policy discussions with President Bill Clinton at the White House and Camp David. She writes both for scholarly outlets and for publications appealing to the educated public. Married since 1967 to Bill Skocpol, an experimental physicist who teaches at Boston University, Theda Skocpol is the proud mother of Michael Allan Skocpol, born in 1988. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Paul C. Zamecnik | | | Institution: | Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | October 27, 2009 | | | | | | |
Paul Zamecnik is a senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School. He has been affiliated with both institutions for over fifty years and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1936. Dr. Zamecnik's first great scientific contribution was elucidating important aspects of the biochemistry of protein synthesis. He showed that ATP is necessary for peptide bond formation, which therefore is not a reversal of proteolysis; in the cell free system, he devised the ribosome is the site of these reactions; and tRNAs translate sequences of DNA to protein. Early, he performed RNA sequencing that showed 3'-poly A in Rous sarcoma virus RNA, and a prior sequence identical to that at the 5' end, indicating circular structure. His second greatest contribution was the conception of competitive antisense nucleotides. These blocked virus replication by inhibition of translation. He demonstrated the antisense effect with hemoglobin protein synthesizing cells showing that this depends on the ability of deoxynucleotides to enter intact cells and on Watson-Crick base pairing. He has also applied the concept to medicine, targeting the tuberculosis bacterium and the defective cystic fibrosis gene. A three-time winner of the John Collins Warren Triennial Prize, (1946, 1950, 1999) as well as the Presidential Medal of Science (1991), the Lasker Award (1995) and the Institute of Virology's Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), Dr. Zamecnik was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1954, the National Academy of Sciences in 1968 and the American Philosophical Society in 2006. | |
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