Nine Inducted into AAAS

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Seven members of the Northwestern University faculty were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at a ceremony earlier this month. The academy is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies.

The seven are among the nine Northwestern faculty elected fellows in April: Ken Alder, James Allison Brown, Shari Seidman Diamond, James N. Druckman, Alice Hendrickson Eagly, Ehud Kalai, Gregory B. Olson, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and David Theodore Van Zanten.

Alder, Diamond, Druckman, Eagly, Kalai, Olson and Stoddart attended the induction ceremony for the new class of fellows held at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. The event included signing the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Book of Members, a tradition dating back to 1780.

The nine are among the 220 new fellows and 17 foreign honorary members who are leaders in research, scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs.

Members of the AAAS class of 2012 include winners of the National Medal of Science, the Lasker Award, the Pulitzer and the Shaw prizes, the Fields Medal; MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships; the Kennedy Center Honors; Grammy, Emmy, Academy and Tony awards; the Avery Fisher Prize, and election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Northwestern members:

• Ken Alder is the Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities and a professor of history in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Alder, founder of Northwestern’s Science in Human Culture Program, studies the history of modern science and technology in the context of social and political change. He has published studies of 18th-century France and 20th-century America. His first book, “Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815,” published in 1997, won the Edelstein Prize from the Society of the History of Technology. His second book, “The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World,” was published in 2002 and won the Davis Prize from the History of Science Society and the Dingle Prize of the British Society for the History of Science, was co-winner of the Kagan Prize for European History from The Historical Society and has been translated into 12 languages.

Alder’s most recent work, “The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession,” was published in 2007. For this and his current project, a comparative study of the relationship between science and the law in France and America from the 16th century to the present, he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Foundation. He has also served on the executive councils of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology as well as an advisory editor on their respective journals, Isis and Technology & Culture.

• James Allison Brown is professor emeritus of anthropology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Brown is an archaeologist with broad interests in the aboriginal cultures of North America, past and present. His research has been directed towards detailed examination of social and cultural complexity in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Critical to this endeavor has been an effort to move the archaeological debate from typically parochial concerns to a globally based framework that allows the archaeological record of the Eastern Woodlands to be examined cross-culturally. Currently, he has been concentrating on religious and social changes over the past 1,000 years. Iconography has been employed as a route to the study of religion, canonical representation and craft specialization.

The author and co-editor of a number of books, Brown is a recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Service and various state agencies. He serves on the board of directors of the Center for American Archeology (Kampsville) and has served as commissioner of the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor Commission and on the board of directors of the Illinois State Museum (including chairman of the board). He is the holder of the 1999 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for American Archaeology and the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Graduate Faculty Award (2004). He is also a member of the Registry of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) and a certified professional archaeologist in Illinois.

• Shari Seidman Diamond is the Howard J. Trienens Professor of Law and a professor of psychology.

Diamond is one of the foremost empirical researchers on jury process and legal decision-making, including the use of science by the courts.

She is the author and co-author of more than 100 articles and essays in law reviews and behavioral science journals; her publications on juries and surveys have been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court as well as other federal and state courts.

Diamond has lectured widely to scholarly and judicial audiences and has served as an expert witness in American and Canadian courts on matters concerning juries, trademarks and deceptive advertising. Diamond received the 2010 Harry Kalven, Jr. Award from the Law and Society Association for contributions to research in law and society and the 1991 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy. As a member of the ABA’s American Jury Project, she helped draft the Principles for Juries and Jury Trials adopted in 2005. She served on the executive committee of the American Jury Project Commission of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association and currently serves on the Seventh Circuit Committee on Pattern Criminal Jury Instructions.

• James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research.

Druckman is a specialist in public opinion, political communication and experimental methodology whose recent work examines how citizens make political, economic and social decisions. In prior work, he explored the relationship between citizen’s preferences and public policy and how political elites make decisions under varying institutional conditions. Druckman currently edits the journal Public Opinion Quarterly and the University of Chicago Press’ Chicago Studies in American Politics.

Druckman, who was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012, has published more than 70 articles and book chapters in political science, communication, economic and psychology journals.

His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including 12 best paper awards; he also has received grant support from such entities as the National Science Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and Phi Beta Kappa. His teaching/advising has been recognized with the Outstanding Award for Freshman Advising and an Outstanding Faculty citation by Northwestern’s Associated Student Government.

• Alice Hendrickson Eagly is the James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences and a professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; a faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research and a professor of management and organization.

Eagly’s research examines the psychology of gender, especially sex differences in similarities in leadership, prosocial behavior, aggression, partner preferences and sociopolitical attitudes. She also contributed to theories of sex differences and similarities and of the origins of sex differences in social behavior. Eagly has also investigated the psychology of attitudes, especially attitude change, attitude structure and attitudinal selectivity in information processing.

She is the author and co-author of numerous journal articles and books, including “Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders” (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) with Linda Carli, which examines the advantages and disadvantages of women as leaders. Eagly is also the author of “The Psychology of Attitudes” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993) with Shelly Chaiken and the co-editor of “The Social Psychology of Group Identity and Social Conflict: Theory, Application, and Practice” (APA Books, 2004) and “The Psychology of Gender” (2nd ed.) (Guilford Press, 2004).

Eagly has received many awards over the years, including the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Social Psychology by the American Psychological Foundation in 2009. She was also the recipient of the 2011 Raymond A. Katzell Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the 2009 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2008 Distinguished Publication Award from Association for Women in Psychology and the 2011 Berlin Prize. She has served as president of the Midwestern Psychological Association, president of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, chair of the board of scientific affairs of the APA and chair of the executive committee of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

• Ehud Kalai is the James J. O’Connor Distinguished Professor of Decision and Game Sciences and director of the Center for Strategic Decision Making at the Kellogg School of Management.

Kalai has advanced the frontiers of game theory and its interface with economics, social choice, operations research and computer science. His work has opened and expanded understanding of bargaining, strategic learning, large games and related subjects. The research is reported in more than 60 scientific papers published by the leading game theory, economics and operations journals.

Kalai is the founding editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the top journal in game theory today, co-founder and president of the international Game Theory Society and fellow of the Econometric Society.

• Gregory B. Olson is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

A designer of high-performance alloys, Olson is considered a founder of computational materials design. He directs the Materials Technology Laboratory/Steel Research Group at McCormick. Olson developed a systematic science-based approach for designing structural materials that takes the desired properties and calculates the optimum composition and processing route. Beyond materials design, his research interests include phase transformations, structure/property relationships and applications of high-resolution microanalysis.

Olson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1997, he founded QuesTek Innovations LLC, a materials design company whose first creation was a high-performance steel for gears that was designed at Northwestern and licensed to the company. Dec. 17, 2010, marked the historic first flight of QuesTek’s Ferrium S53 aircraft landing gear steel, the first fully computationally designed and flight-qualified material.

• Sir Fraser Stoddart is the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

By introducing an additional type of bond (the mechanical bond) into chemical compounds, Stoddart became one of the few chemists to have opened up a new field of chemistry during the last 25 years. His areas of expertise include molecular electronics (using molecules on the nanoscale as the tiniest of switches to create molecular memory) and artificial molecular machines (to create controllable and targeted drug delivery systems). Stoddart is ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information for the period of the last decade as one of the top 10 most-cited chemists in the world.

He is a fellow of the Science Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; the German Academy of Natural Sciences; the Royal Society of London, the national academy of sciences of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth Countries; and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s national academy of arts and sciences. His many awards include the King Faisal International Prize in Science (2007) and the Royal Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, presented by the Duke of Edinburgh in 2010.  

• David Theodore Van Zanten is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art and Art History in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Van Zanten examines how architects think and why modern society bestows such confidence and authority on them, for example, in the design of whole cities -- first in Europe and the Americas, and now in China, and the BRICS periphery. He began, in the 1970s, working on the troubled interface between the most highly trained national profession, that of 19th-century France, and the resistant and complex form of Paris, the subject of his involvement in the exhibition “The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts” (Museum of Modern Art, 1975) and his books “Designing Paris” (1987) and “Building Paris” (1994).  

He has explored its broader manifestation in the struggle to control the form of the British industrial city during the decades before the “transformation” of Paris and in the case of the burgeoning German city of Hamburg after a catastrophic fire of 1842. He has always followed this subject’s complex manifestation in Chicago -- the most architectural city in America (but just what does that mean?). It is the focus of his forthcoming exhibition at the Block Museum, “Drawing the Future” (spring 2013) focusing on the 1912 design of the capital of Australia, Canberra, by the Frank Lloyd Wright assistants Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin, and the subject of a number of publications beginning with his “Walter Burley Griffin: Selected Designs” of 1970 and “Sullivan’s City” of 2000 as well as his edited volume, “Marion Mahony Reconsidered” of summer 2011.    

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious learned societies, and an independent research center that draws from its members’ expertise to conduct studies in science and technology policy, global security, the humanities and culture, social policy and education.