Three Caltech Faculty Named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The 2003 class of 187 fellows and 29 foreign honorary members includes four college presidents, three Nobel laureates, and four Pulitzer Prize winners.
Among this year's new fellows and foreign honorary members are Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations; journalist Walter Cronkite; philanthropist William H. Gates, Sr., co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; novelist Michael Cunningham; recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby; artist Cindy Sherman; and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donald Glaser.
"It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals to the nation's oldest and most illustrious learned society. Election to the American Academy is an honor that acknowledges the best of all scholarly fields and professions. Newly elected fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines," said academy president Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Anson has carried out pioneering work on the electrochemistry of polymers, on the catalysis of electrode reactions, and on electrochemical reactions that involve ultrathin coating of molecules on electrode surfaces.
Kirschvink, who has been honored by students for his excellence in teaching, studies how biological evolution has influenced, and has been influenced by, major events on the surface of the earth. His most significant contributions include the "snowball" earth theory—the theory that the entire Earth may have actually frozen over several times in its history, possibly stimulating evolution. Another original concept concerns the Cambrian evolutionary explosion that he believes may have been precipitated in part by the earth's rotational axis having moved to the equator in a geologically short interval of time.
Camerer's research in experimental and behavioral economics, integrates psychology with economics to explore the impact on decision sciences and game theory. His research uses economics experiments and field studies to understand how people behave when making decisions. Such research is helpful in predicting economic trends and in understanding social policy. Poverty, war, cross-cultural interactions--most social issues are affected by decision psychology.
The total number of Caltech faculty named to the academy is now 82.
The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The academy has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, social policy, education, and the humanities.
A full list of new members is available on the Academy website at http://www.amacad.org/news/new2003.htm.
The academy will welcome this year's new fellows and foreign honorary members at the annual induction ceremony at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., in October.
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