| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Carol T. Christ | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley; Smith College | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | 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: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Carol T. Christ is, as of July 2017, the Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. An esteemed scholar of English literature and a recognized leader in higher education, Carol T. Christ was the 10th president of Smith College. She retired as president in June 2013. Christ came to Smith in 2002 following a 30-year career in teaching and administration at the University of California, Berkeley, which culminated in her appointment as executive vice chancellor, the university’s top academic officer. At Smith, Christ has led a comprehensive strategic planning process to identify the distinctive intellectual traditions of the Smith curriculum and to develop students’ essential capacities. The Smith Design for Learning: A Plan to Reimagine a Liberal Arts Education identifies priority areas - among them, international studies, environmental sustainability, and community engagement - for significant investment over the coming decade. The product of two years of intensive work and the engagement of thousands of alumnae, faculty, staff and students, The Smith Design underscores Smith’s mission to "educate women of promise for lives of distinction." Under Christ’s leadership, Smith undertook one of the most ambitious capital projects in the college’s history: Ford Hall, a state-of-the-art, sustainably designed classroom and laboratory facility named in recognition of its lead donor, the Ford Motor Company Fund. Opened in fall 2009, Ford Hall is home to the college’s pioneering Picker Engineering Program as well as the departments of molecular biology, chemistry, biochemistry and computer science. In 2010, Christ launched The Futures Initiative, a year-long strategic-thinking project focused on 2020 and beyond, which examined the college’s academic and financial models in the context of trends in higher education. Participants - trustees, faculty and senior campus leaders - engaged questions of demographics, globalization, pre- and post-college education, and diverse pathways toward an undergraduate degree, with the aim of positioning Smith for long-term success.
Over the decade of Christ’s leadership, the student body has become notably more diverse and international, reflecting a commitment to educating students who are prepared to assume leadership roles around the world. Christ has extended Smith’s global ties, through partnerships such as Women’s Education Worldwide, an organization of women’s colleges in 20 countries, and the Women in Public Service Project, a founding partnership of the Department of State and the five leading U.S. women’s colleges to train a new generation of women to enter the public sector with the skills and passion to address global challenges. In spring 2012, Smith agreed to serve as the academic planning partner for a new liberal arts university for women, the Asian Women’s Leadership University, in Malaysia.
Christ graduated with honors from Douglass College and received her doctorate from Yale University.
As president, she continued to teach, offering seminars on science and literature, and on the arts. In 2004 she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in recognition of her accomplishments in higher education. In 2007 Yale University Graduate School presented Christ with its highest honor, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, in recognition of her distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration and public service. In 2011 she was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the American College of Greece for her service to education and public life. Carol Christ was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 2 | Name: | Mr. Roberto Diaz | | | Institution: | The Curtis Institute of Music | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | | |
A violist of international reputation, Roberto Díaz is President and CEO of the Curtis Institute of Music, following in the footsteps of renowned soloist/directors such as Josef Hofmann, Efrem Zimbalist, and Rudolf Serkin. As a teacher of viola at Curtis and former principal viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Mr. Díaz has already had a significant impact on American musical life and continues to do so in his dual roles as performer and educator.
As a soloist, Mr. Díaz collaborates with leading conductors of our time on stages throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. He has also worked directly with important 20th- and 21st-century composers, including Krzysztof Penderecki, whose viola concerto he has performed many times with the composer on the podium and whose double concerto he will premiere in the United States during the 13-14 season; and Edison Denisov who invited Mr. Díaz to Moscow to work on his viola concerto. Ricardo Lorenz and Roberto Sierra have written concerti for Mr. Díaz, and he will premiere a concerto by Jennifer Higdon in 2015.
As a frequent recitalist, Mr. Díaz enjoys collaborating with young pianists, bringing a fresh approach to the repertoire and providing invaluable opportunities to artists at the beginnings of their careers. In addition to performing with major string quartets and pianists in chamber music series and festivals worldwide, Mr. Díaz has toured Europe, Asia, and the Americas a member of the Díaz Trio with violinist Andrés Cárdenes and cellist Andrés Díaz. The Díaz Trio has recorded for the Artek and Dorian labels.
Mr. Díaz’s recordings on the Naxos label with pianist Robert Koenig include the complete works for viola and piano by Henri Vieuxtemps and a Grammy-nominated disc of viola transcriptions by William Primrose. Also on Naxos are Brahms sonatas with Jeremy Denk and Jonathan Leshnoff’s Double Concerto with violinist Charles Wetherbee and the Iris Chamber Orchestra led by Michael Stern. On the New World Records label is a live recording of Mr. Díaz’s performance of Jacob Druckman's Viola Concerto with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Upcoming releases include the Walton Viola Concerto with the New Haven Symphony and William Boughton (Nimbus) and works for viola and orchestra by Peter Lieberson with the Odense Symphony Orchestra and Scott Yoo (Bridge Records).
Since founding Curtis On Tour six seasons ago, Mr. Díaz has taken the hugely successful program to North and South America, Europe, and Asia, performing chamber music side-by-side with Curtis students and other faculty and alumni of the school. In addition to Curtis On Tour, his tenure as president of Curtis has seen the construction of a significant new building which doubled the size of the school’s campus, the introduction of a classical guitar department, the launch of summer courses open to the public, and the debut of an online stage called Curtis Performs. In the fall of 2013 Curtis will become the first classical music conservatory to offer free online classes through Coursera. Also under Mr. Díaz’s leadership, the school has developed lasting collaborations with other music and arts institutions in Philadelphia and throughout the world and has established the Community Artists Program (CAP) to develop the entrepreneurial and advocacy skills of young musicians.
Mr. Díaz received an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College and was awarded an honorary membership by the National Board of the American Viola Society. In the fall of 2013 Mr. Díaz will become a member of the prestigious American Philosophical Society founded by Benjamin Franklin. As a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he was selected by Music Director Christoph Eschenbach to receive the C. Hartman Kuhn Award, given annually to "the member of the Philadelphia Orchestra who has shown ability and enterprise of such character as to enhance the standards and the reputation of the Philadelphia Orchestra." Mr. Díaz received a bachelor’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music where he studied with Burton Fine, and a diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music where his teacher was his predecessor at the Philadelphia Orchestra, Joseph de Pasquale. Mr. Díaz also has a degree in industrial design.
In addition to his decade-long tenure as principal viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he performed the entire standard viola concerto repertoire and gave a number of Philadelphia Orchestra premieres, Mr. Díaz was principal viola of the National Symphony under Mstislav Rostropovich, a member of the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa, and a member of the Minnesota Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner. Mr. Díaz plays the ex-Primrose Amati viola. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg | | | Institution: | Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | 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: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Harvey V. Fineberg began serving as President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2014. He served as President of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) from 2002 to 2014. He served as Provost of Harvard University from 1997 to 2001, following thirteen years as Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. He has devoted most of his academic career to the fields of health policy and medical decision making, including assessment of medical technology, evaluation and use of vaccines, and dissemination of medical innovations. In March of 2020 he was named chair of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats. The standing committee was requested by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to the COVID-19 outbreak and will provide a neutral forum for experts to rapidly engage with the federal government.
Dr. Fineberg helped found and served as president of the Society for Medical Decision Making and has been a consultant to the World Health Organization. He serves on the boards of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, The China Medical Board, and the Association François-Xavier Bagnoud (USA).
Dr. Fineberg is co-author of the books Clinical Decision Analysis, Innovators in Physician Education, and The Epidemic that Never Was, an analysis of the controversial federal immunization program against swine flu in 1976. He has co-edited books on such diverse topics as AIDS prevention, vaccine safety, and understanding risk in society. He has also authored numerous articles published in professional journals. Dr. Fineberg received the Stephen Smith Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Public Health from the New York Academy of Medicine, the Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health, awarded by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, awarded by Friends of Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Harvard Medal from the Harvard Alumni Association, and a number of honorary degrees. He earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dame Zaha Hadid | | | Institution: | Zaha Hadid Architects | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | 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? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | Death Date: | March 31, 2016 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Mr. Tony Kushner | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Tony Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Angels in America, Parts One and Two; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; the musical Caroline, or Change and the opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, both with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide To Capitalism And Socialism With A Key To The Scriptures. He has adapted and translated Pierre Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the English-language libretto for the opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels In America, and for Steven Spielberg's Munich and Lincoln. His books include Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, among other honors. He was presented the 2012 National Medal of Arts by President Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Richard C. Levin | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | 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 | | | | | | |
Richard C. Levin served as President of Yale University from 1993 to 2013. He is now President Emeritus and Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics. In from 2014-17 he was Chief Executive of Coursera, a provider of online academic courses. He is now Senior Advisor to the company, which enrolls seven million people in hundreds of free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, from more than 100 partner universities in 19 countries. Mr. Levin had been experimenting with online education for years, beginning in 2000 in a partnership with Stanford and Oxford. In 2007, he started Open Yale Courses to make dozens of classes taught by Yale professors available without cost.
He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1968 and studied politics and philosophy at Oxford University, where he earned a B.Litt. Degree. In 1974 he received his Ph.D. from Yale and joined the Yale faculty. Before becoming president, he chaired the economics department and served as dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Levin served on President Obama’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST). He is a trustee of the Hewlett Foundation and a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. He served on a bipartisan commission to recommend improvements in the nation’s intelligence capabilities and chaired a major review of the nation’s patent system for the National Academy of Sciences. President Levin holds honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Peking, Tokyo, and Waseda universities and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Richard C. Levin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 7 | Name: | Professor Dr. Hermann Parzinger | | | Institution: | Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | 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: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Professor Dr. HERMANN PARZINGER was born in 1959 in Munich. He studied Prehistory, Archaeology and Medieval History from 1979 to 1984 at universities in Munich, Saarbrücken and Ljubljana (Slovenia). In 1985 he received his doctoral degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, where he then worked as Associate Professor from 1986 to 1990. After completing his Habilitation he was appointed in 1990 to the position of Deputy Director of the Römisch-Germanische Kommission of the German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt/Main; in this capacity he headed up excavations in Spain and Turkey. From 1995 to 2003 he acted as Director of the Eurasian Department of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin and led various archaeological research projects in Siberia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Iran. In 1996 he was appointed Honorary Professor for Pre-historic archaeology at the Free University in Berlin, where he continues to teach at present. From 2003 to 2008 he was appointed President of the German Archaeological Institute, and since March 2008 he is President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation).
In 1998 Hermann Parzinger received the highly distinguished Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). In 2009 President D. Medvedev of Russia bestowed upon him the “Medal of Friendship”, the highest Russian symbol of recognition for foreign citizens. Nominated by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences he received in 2011 the Reuchlin Award of the City of Pforzheim for outstanding achievements in the Humanities. In 2011 he was admitted into the highly selective Orden Pour le mérite for Arts and Sciences. In 2012 he received from the German president the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2013 the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz awarded him the Sybille Kalkhof-Rose Academy Award for outstanding contribution in the Humanities.
He is a member of numerous academies in Russia, China, Spain, Great Britain, Romania, the United States of America and Germany such as amongst others the British Academy, the Royal Academy of History in Madrid, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences in Germany, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In addition he is amongst other President of the German Association of Archaeology, Speaker in the German-Russian Museum Dialogue, Chairman of the Working Group Culture in the Petersburg Dialogue, Chairman of the members of the Forum for Transregional Studies and Member of the Board of the Berlin Cluster of Excellence "TOPOI. The Formation and Transformations of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations".
His primary academic focus is on cultural transformations in zones of contact in Europa and Asia. His research projects were dedicated to different periods and topics, dealing with man’s transition to sedentary life in the early Neolithic as well as the beginnings of early nomadism in the 1st millennium BC in the Eurasian steppe belt. Especially noteworthy were his outstanding discoveries of a royal tomb from the Scythian period in Arzhan in Tuva (South Siberia) and of an ice mummy from the same period in the Altai mountains. To this day questions revolving around the origins and of mounted nomads, their conditions of life and culture and the emergence of elite groups in prehistoric societies are central to him. He has written 15 books and over 250 essays on these topics. Furthermore since 2008 he has increasingly published works dealing with cultural and academic policy issues.
Hermann Parzinger was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Sarah E. Thomas | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | 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: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Sarah Thomas was Bodley's Librarian, the first woman and non-British citizen to hold the position since 1602. She headed the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford from 2007 through July 2013. From August 2013 through March 2019 she took up the position of Vice President for the Harvard Library at Harvard University and subsequently was also named University Librarian and Roy E. Larsen Librarian of the Faculty of Arts and Science. She shaped the library's vision to increase focus on user-centered services that connect faculty, students, alumni, and researchers with library resources online and in person. She spearheaded efforts to advance digital scholarship, committing library resources to open access and she advanced collaboration among libraries in areas such as shared storage, shared resources, and shared collections. She was University Librarian at Cornell University from 1996 until 2007. She began her career at Harvard University's Widener Library and has since worked at Johns Hopkins University, the Research Libraries Group (Stanford, CA), the National Agricultural Library, and the Library of Congress. She is a recipient of the Smith College Medal (2009), the Melvil Dewey Award (2007) from the American Library Association, and in 2004 she served as the President of the Association of Research Libraries. From 2013 to 2020 she was a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition she has served on the boards of OCLC, the Natural History Museum, London, Historic Deerfield, and the Walters Art Gallery. She is a graduate of Smith College, and holds a MS in Library Science from Simmons College, Boston, and a Ph.D. in German literature from the Johns Hopkins University. Sarah Thomas was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
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