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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), an honorary learned society, has announced election of seven Stanford scholars to its membership -- Ronald Bracewell, James Fearon, Hector Garcia-Molina, William Nix, John Perry, Lee Shulman and Allen Wood. The 2002 class of 177 Fellows and 30 Foreign Honorary Members includes a U.S. senator and representative, four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, three MacArthur Fellows and six Guggenheim fellows. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, actress Anjelica Huston and physician-writer Oliver Sacks are among the new members. This year's election brings the total number of Stanford faculty serving on the academy to 220, plus an additional four affiliated with the Hoover Institution. The new Stanford members follow: Ronald N. Bracewell, the Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus, is the first of Stanford's new AAAS members. A radio astronomer who was born in Australia, he created an algorithm to reconstruct astronomical images that was adopted universally in computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scanners. For this accomplishment, he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine and received the Heinrich Hertz Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 1955 he came to Stanford, where he directed the Stanford Radio Astronomy Institute and designed and built dish antennas to monitor solar activity. He chaired the advisory committee for the 1,000-foot radio telescope dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. One of his early research projects was construction of a microwave spectroheliograph that produced daily temperature maps of the sun during an 11-year solar cycle; NASA used the solar weather maps to support the first manned landing on the moon. Bracewell attended the University of Sydney and earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics (1941) and engineering (1943) and a master's of engineering degree (1948). He received a doctorate from Cambridge University in 1950. His many scientific memberships include the Royal Astronomical Society, the Institute of Physics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served as an adviser to the National Science Foundation, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Radio Research Station and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Co-author with J. L. Pawsey of the first textbook on radio astronomy, he has contributed chapters to dozens of books and published more than 200 scientific papers. James Fearon, a professor of political science, researches civil and interstate war and ethnic conflict. He is collaborating with political science Professor David Laitin on a book manuscript titled Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War. Fearon also has published articles on international bargaining strategies, democratic theory and counterfactual reasoning in social science. He has taught courses at Stanford on nationalism and international conflict, and the explanation of ethnic violence. Fearon earned his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. His honors include the International Studies Association's 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is presented to a young scholar who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research. In 1997, Fearon and Laitin received the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in 1996, and the 1997 Gregory Luebbert Award for best article published in Comparative Politics in 1996. The article was "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation." Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra K. Lerner Professor in the School of Engineering and chair of the Computer Science Department. His research interests include distributed computing systems and database systems. He was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton from 1979 to 1991. Joining Stanford in 1992, he directed the Computer Systems Laboratory from 1994 to 1997. He was a member from 1997 to 2001 of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, which advised federal agencies in expanding the Internet's capacity for research and education projects. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford, he received a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1975 and a doctorate in computer science in 1979. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), recipient of the 1999 ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Innovations Award, and a member of the technical advisory boards of eGuanxi, Enosys Markets, Metreo Markets, Morhsoft, Radik, TimesTen and Verity, and the board of directors of Oracle. William D. Nix, of the Materials Science and Engineering Department, is the Lee Otterson Professor in the School of Engineering. His research interests include imperfections in crystalline solids and their relation to the mechanical properties of bulk and thin-film materials. Current projects focus on the development of experimental techniques for the study of mechanical properties of thin films and on the modeling of these properties. He is also engaged in research on the mechanical properties of bulk metallic glasses. Nix received a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from San Jose State College in 1959, a master's degree in metallurgical engineering from Stanford in 1960 and a doctorate in materials science from Stanford in 1963. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he was the Institute of Metals Lecturer and received the Robert Franklin Mehl Award from the Metallurgical Society in 1988, the Acta Metallurgica Gold Medal in 1993, the Educator Award from the Metallurgical Society in 1995 and the American Society for Metals (ASM) Gold Medal from ASM International in 1998. John Perry, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy, joined the Philosophy Department in 1974. He is the author of five books, including A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality; Dialogue on Good, Evil and the Existence of God; Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness; Reference and Reflexivity; and, with Jon Barwise, Situations and Attitudes. He also has written more than 70 articles, book sections and reference-work entries, some of which are collected in The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Identity, Personal Identity and the Self. Perry earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at Doane College in 1964 and a doctorate in philosophy at Cornell in 1968. He served as chair of Stanford's Philosophy Department from 1976 to 1982 and again during the 1990-91 academic year. He founded the Center for the Study of Language and Information, which he directed during the 1985-86 academic year and again from 1993 to 1999. Perry is also a humorist, and a link to his lighter essays can be found on his web page, www-csli.stanford.edu/~john. Lee Shulman, professor emeritus of education, has been president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching since 1997. During the latter part of his career, he has worked on how to strengthen the role of teaching in higher education. These studies have emphasized the importance of "teaching as community property" and the central role of the "scholarship of teaching" in supporting changes in the culture of higher education. Shulman earned his doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Chicago in 1963. He was on the faculty of Michigan State University from 1964 until he came to Stanford in 1982. Shulman is past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Academy of Education. He received AERA's highest honor, the career award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research, and is recipient of the 1995 E. L. Thorndike Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education from the American Psychological Association. Allen Wood, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, joined the Department of Philosophy in 1999 from Yale University. His research interests include the history of modern philosophy -- particularly German philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries -- ethics, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Considered one of the foremost Kant scholars in the United States, Wood earned a bachelor's degree in literature and philosophy at Reed College in 1964. He went on to study philosophy at Yale, where he earned a master's degree in 1966 and doctorate in 1968. He is the author of five books: Kant's Moral Religion; Kant's Rational Theology; Karl Marx; Hegel's Ethical Thought; and Kant's Ethical Thought. His forthcoming publications include a new translation of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Yale University Press) and Unsettling Obligations, a collection of essays focusing on the ethics of belief (Stanford's CSLI Publications). He is also the author of more than 70 articles, reviews, book sections and reference-work entries. The AAAS 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." Members are elected for distinction and achievement in five areas: mathematics and physics; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities and arts; and public affairs and business. "The American Academy is unique among America's academies for its breadth and scope," says AAAS Executive Officer Leslie C. Berlowitz. "Throughout its history, the academy has gathered individuals with diverse perspectives to participate in studies and projects focusing on advancing intellectual thought and constructive action in American society." Dawn Levy, John Sanford and Lisa Trei contributed to this
report. |
Ronald N. Bracewell
James Fearon
Hector Garcia-Molina
William D. Nix
John Perry
Lee Shulman
Allen Wood |
Stanford Report, May 8, 2002
