Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

When John Adams, James Bowdoin, and John Hancock helped charter the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 1780, the Revolutionary War was still being fought. The Academy was conceived as a learned society in the European mold, intended to give the new republic a forum where natural philosophy, the humanities, and public affairs could be taken up by the same body of thinkers. More than two centuries later, election as a Fellow remains one of the older recognitions of intellectual distinction in the United States, and the membership reflects the broadening of American scholarship from a small circle of New England clergymen and gentlemen-scientists into a global community working across the sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, business, and public life.

Background

The Academy was founded in Boston during the second year of independence, modeled in part on the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences. Its charter, signed by Governor John Hancock, set out a mandate to "cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." Early members included Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, a pattern that set an enduring expectation: the Fellows would include not only researchers and creative artists but also jurists, statesmen, and leaders of major institutions.

Fellows are elected annually by the existing membership, in classes that have, over time, been organized around the mathematical and physical sciences, the biological sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and arts, and a class for public affairs, business, and administration. The Academy publishes the quarterly journal Dædalus and convenes studies on issues ranging from nuclear security to the future of the humanities. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since the late twentieth century, it operates as both an honorary society and a working research organization.

Notable members

The economists in the membership illustrate the depth of the social-science class. Gary Becker extended economic analysis to discrimination, the family, and human capital; Eugene Fama developed the efficient-markets framework that reshaped modern finance; George Akerlof introduced the analysis of markets with asymmetric information through his work on the "market for lemons." James Tobin worked on portfolio theory and macroeconomic policy at Yale. Ben Bernanke moved between academic monetary economics and the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial crisis. The development-economics tradition is represented by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, whose randomized field experiments at MIT's Poverty Action Lab, conducted with Joshua Angrist and others, contributed to the credibility revolution in empirical economics. Douglas Diamond (also listed as Douglas W. Diamond) is known for the Diamond–Dybvig model of bank runs and for theoretical work on financial intermediation.

The behavioral and cognitive sciences appear through figures such as Amos Tversky, whose collaboration with Daniel Kahneman produced prospect theory and reshaped how economists, lawyers, and physicians think about judgment under uncertainty. John Hopfield, a physicist who turned to neural computation, gave his name to the Hopfield network, an early model linking statistical mechanics to memory and learning.

The physical sciences are represented by Kip Thorne, whose theoretical work on general relativity underpinned the LIGO detection of gravitational waves, and Andrea Ghez, whose decades of infrared observations at the Keck Observatory established the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Andrei Okounkov works at the intersection of representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics, and received the Fields Medal in 2006.

In the life sciences, the membership covers molecular genetics, structural biology, and biomedical innovation. H. Robert Horvitz traced programmed cell death in C. elegans, laying foundations for cancer and developmental biology. Aziz Sancar mapped the molecular machinery of DNA repair. Joachim Frank developed single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, which has transformed structural biology. Ardem Patapoutian identified the Piezo ion channels responsible for the sense of touch and mechanosensation. Drew Weissman, with Katalin Karikó, worked out the nucleoside modifications that made messenger-RNA vaccines clinically viable.

The legal and judicial tradition in the Academy is unusually deep, reaching back to its founding generation. Joseph Story, appointed to the Supreme Court at thirty-two, shaped American commercial and constitutional law and the early Harvard Law School. [[Benjamin Robbins Curtis] authored the principal dissent in Dred Scott v. Sandford. [[Horace Gray] served on both the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. John Marshall Harlan II sat on the Warren Court and was known for careful, narrowly framed opinions. Edward Levi combined a legal-academic career as dean and president at the University of Chicago with service as U.S. Attorney General after Watergate.

Public life and institutional leadership form another strand. Adlai Stevenson II, twice the Democratic nominee for president and later ambassador to the United Nations, exemplifies the mid-century pattern of politicians drawn from the Academy's ambit. More recent business members include Indra Nooyi, former chair and chief executive of PepsiCo; Chuck Robbins, chief executive of Cisco; and the venture capitalist John Doerr, whose firm Kleiner Perkins backed many of Silicon Valley's defining companies. Katrina Armstrong, an internist and health-services researcher, has led major academic medical centers.

Patterns across the membership

Several patterns emerge from a roster of this kind. One is the persistent overlap between research and public service: Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, Levi at the Justice Department, Stevenson at the United Nations, and the long line of jurists from Story to Harlan II. Another is the gravitational pull of a small number of research universities. Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia recur in the affiliations of the economists, mathematicians, physicists, and biologists listed above, reflecting the concentration of American basic research at a handful of institutions.

A third pattern is the prominence of Nobel laureates and equivalent honorees. Becker, Akerlof, Tobin, Fama, Bernanke, Banerjee, Duflo, Angrist, Horvitz, Sancar, Frank, Patapoutian, Weissman, Thorne, and Ghez have all received Nobel Prizes, and Okounkov holds the Fields Medal. Election to the Academy frequently precedes such recognition by years or decades, since Fellows are typically chosen on the basis of cumulative contributions to a field rather than a single result.

A fourth pattern, visible across the eras represented here, is the Academy's gradual widening from a primarily New England, primarily male, primarily Anglo-American group toward a membership that includes immigrants, women, and scholars working in fields, such as behavioral economics, cryo-EM, and gravitational-wave astronomy, that did not exist when the charter was signed in 1780.