The measles ‘is not a benign disease’
March 5, 2025
Nine members of the Northwestern University faculty have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies.
Christine Brennan, Cynthia E. Coburn, Jennifer Lackey, Gregory E. Miller, Akinwumi Ogundiran, Frederic A. Rasio, Sergio T. Rebelo, Daniel B. Rodriguez and Brian D. Uzzi are among the nearly 250 members elected in 2025. They are recognized for their excellence and commitment to uphold the Academy’s mission of engaging with professions across different perspectives.
“These new members’ accomplishments speak volumes about the human capacity for discovery, creativity, leadership and persistence. They are a stellar testament to the power of knowledge to broaden our horizons and deepen our understanding,” said Laurie L. Patton, president of the Academy. “We invite every new member to celebrate their achievement and join the Academy in our work to promote the common good.”
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and others, the Academy was founded on ideals that celebrate the life of the mind, the importance of knowledge and the belief that the arts and sciences are “necessary to the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”
Northwestern’s newest members are:
Christine Brennan
Christine Brennan is an award-winning national sports columnist for USA Today; a commentator for CNN, ABC News, PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio; a best-selling author; and a nationally recognized speaker. Named one of the country’s top 10 sports columnists by the Associated Press Sports Editors multiple times, she has covered the last 21 Olympic Games, summer and winter.
In March 2020, Brennan was named the winner of the prestigious Red Smith Award, presented annually to a person who has made “major contributions to sports journalism.”
Brennan was the first woman sports writer at The Miami Herald in 1981 and the first woman to cover the Washington Football Team as a staff writer at The Washington Post in 1985. She was the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media and started an internship-scholarship program that has supported 200 female students over the past two decades.
Brennan is the author of seven books. Her 2006 sports memoir, “Best Seat in the House,” is the only father-daughter memoir written by a sports journalist. Her 1996 national best-seller, “Inside Edge,” was named one of the top 100 sports books of all-time by Sports Illustrated.
Brennan earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University. She is a member of the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame, Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism Hall of Achievement, Northwestern’s Athletic Hall of Fame and the Washington, D.C., Sports Hall of Fame.
She has received honorary degrees from Marist University, Tiffin (Ohio) University and the University of Toledo. She is a member of Northwestern’s Board of Trustees and a professor of practice at Medill.
Cynthia E. Coburn
Cynthia Coburn is a professor of human development and social policy and professor of learning sciences at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. She also is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.
Coburn has spent much of her career studying the relationship between instructional policy and teachers’ classroom practices in schools, the dynamics of school district policy making and the relationship between research and practice for school improvement.
She has won numerous awards for her scholarship, including the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award, election to the National Academy of Education (2020) and Northwestern University’s Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship (2020).
Jennifer Lackey
Jennifer Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law (courtesy) at Northwestern.
Lackey’s research is primarily in social epistemology, with an emphasis on epistemic issues within the American criminal legal system. She is the author of three books, including “Criminal Testimonial Injustice,” which won the 2024 North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. She is editor-in-chief of Philosophical Studies and Episteme.
Lackey is founding director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, the first program in the U.S. to award bachelor’s degrees from a top-10 university to incarcerated students. She is the winner of the 2024 Humanitas Award, the 2023 Horace Mann Medal, and the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. She was named the 2025 holder of the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam and has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Gregory E. Miller
Gregory E. Miller is Louis W. Menk Professor in the department of psychology at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern.
Miller co-directs the Foundations of Health Research Center where his research focuses on early-life stressors related to poverty, and how they influence disease risks across the lifespan. His research aims to understand how socioeconomic conditions affect children’s health and to leverage this knowledge to improve practices and policies aimed at mitigating health disparities.
He has been recognized with an early career award from the American Psychological Association and was twice named a highly cited researcher by Clarivate Analytics, a designation for authors whose article citation rates were in top 1% of their field. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Akinwumi Ogundiran
Akin Ogundiran is professor of history and Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences at Weinberg College.
He specializes in the archaeology and history of Africa since 500 BC. His current research intersects cultural, political economy and environmental approaches to study the history of complex social systems.
Ogundiran directs the Material History Lab in the department of history. He is an elected member of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, fellow of the Archaeological Association of Nigeria, and fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and has been awarded the First Citizens Bank Scholars Medal for Research Excellence from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a Certificate of Special U.S. Congressional Recognition for Excellence in Service.
His research has been supported by the National Geographic Society, the Carnegie Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ogundiran is the current president of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.
Frederic A. Rasio
Frederic Rasio is the Joseph Cummings Professor of Physics at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).
Rasio studies the long-term dynamics of planetary systems, including the chaotic dynamics of multi-planet systems as they evolve over billions of years. He also studies the evolution of dense stellar clusters over the history of the universe. His most recent work focuses on gravitational wave sources and the formation of massive black holes. A leader in understanding the dynamics of compact objects, Rasio also has made important contributions to understanding the formation of binary black holes.
Since 2013, Rasio has served as the editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Astronomical Society. He also received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Brouwer Career Award from the American Astronomical Society.
Sergio T. Rebelo
Sergio T. Rebelo is the MUFG Bank Distinguished Professor of International Finance at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He is also the faculty director of the EMBA Program.
Rebelo’s research revolves around macroeconomics and international finance. He has studied the causes of business cycles, the impact of economic policy on economic growth and the sources of exchange rate fluctuations. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, the Sloan Foundation and the Olin Foundation.
He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research. He has been a member of the editorial board of various academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth.
Daniel B. Rodriguez
Daniel Rodriguez is the Harold Washington Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He previously served as dean of the law school from January 2012 through August 2018.
His principal academic work is in the areas of administrative law, local government law, statutory interpretation, federal and state constitutional law, and the law-business-technology interface. He has served on the faculties of the University of Texas, University of San Diego (where he also served as dean) and University of California, Berkeley, and has served as a visiting professor at several top law schools, including Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, University of Southern California and Virgina. Rodriguez is a graduate of Harvard Law School and California State University at Long Beach.
Brian D. Uzzi
Brian Uzzi is the Richard Thomas Professor of Leadership at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He also co-directs the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), the Ryan Institute on Complexity and holds professorships in sociology at Weinberg and in industrial engineering and management sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering.
Uzzi’s research uses social network science and computational methods to explain outstanding human achievement. As a globally recognized scientist, teacher and consultant on leadership, social networks and AI, he has consulted for organizations and governments around the globe, including U.S. intelligence agencies, Thomson Reuters, BAE, Google, Microsoft, Intel and Facebook.
