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FOUR IU PROFESSORS ELECTED
TO AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Four professors from Indiana University Bloomington have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinguished honorary society that recognizes achievement in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, and that conducts a varied program of projects and studies responsive to the needs and problems of society.
Among those elected to the 1999 AAAS group of inductees were Jon Barwise, College Professor of philosophy, computer science and mathematics and adjunct professor of linguistics; Thomas C. Kaufman, Distinguished Professor of biology, senior fellow in the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and adjunct professor of medical genetics; Jeffrey D. Palmer, Distinguished Professor and chairman of biology and senior fellow in the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology; and Janos Starker, Distinguished Professor of music.
The American Academy, based in Cambridge, Mass., is an honorary learned society whose members are elected for distinction and achievement in the entire range of the intellectual disciplines and professions. Each year, the fellows of the academy nominate and elect individuals who have made significant contributions to knowledge and culture. The election process is administered by a membership committee made up of academy members representing each field.
The Academy membership consists of approximately 3,400 fellows, elected from citizens or residents of the United States, and 550 foreign honorary members, elected from citizens or residents of foreign countries.
"This is great news for these four faculty members and for Indiana University. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a high honor," said IU President Myles Brand. "Each is eminently qualified, having made major contributions in their fields. An outstanding institution must have top-quality faculty members in the arts and sciences. I couldn't be more pleased with this endorsement of the caliber of our scholars, performers and researchers."
"The Bloomington campus has always been known for nurturing both artistic accomplishment and investigations into the very building blocks of science and technology. Such an atmosphere is what sets a place like IU Bloomington apart from other schools," added Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis, IU vice president for academic affairs and IU Bloomington chancellor. "The arts, humanities, sciences, and performance are at the heart of our mission. The unusual distinction of having four faculty colleagues elected to the AAAS is a tribute both to their discipline and accomplishment and to an environment that allows outstanding people to do their best work."
Here is more information on each of the new AAAS inductees:
Barwise, one of six U.S. humanities professors selected for their expertise in philosophy and theology, is known for his research in logic and its interactions with other fields. His work in pure logic is concerned mainly with model theory and higher recursion theory, and his work in philosophy addresses the implications of epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language for the foundations of logic and mathematics. His work in linguistics and computer science has been directed at developing a theory of information that is rich enough to support an understanding of discourse and computation. Barwise has a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and philosophy from Yale University and a doctorate in mathematics from Stanford University. Before coming to IU in 1990, he was a professor of philosophy at Stanford, where he was a co-founder and first director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information and the first director of the Symbolic Systems Program. He has previously held appointments at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin in mathematics. He was co-winner of the 1997 Educom Medal.
Kaufman, one of seven people recognized for their work in cellular and developmental biology and immunology, joined the IU faculty in 1975 and rose to the rank of Distinguished Professor in 1993. In 1990, Kaufman became the first Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in Indiana. The appointment, through Aug. 31, 2000, carries with it an annual average commitment of $500,000 to Kaufman and his laboratory. His research efforts continue to focus on genetic mutation as expressed in the fruit fly, and his lab has recovered and characterized mutations in all of the resident loci; cloned and sequenced all of the genes; and recovered antisera to all of the protein products. Kaufman is a member of the Genetics Society of America and the Drosophila Genome Project. He is on the editorial board of Developmental Genetics and is past chair of the National Drosophila Board and the NIH Genetic Basis of Disease Review Committee. He has a bachelor of arts degree from California State University and advanced degrees from the University of Texas.
Palmer, one of six people recognized for their work in evolutionary and population biology and ecology, studies evolution at the gene level. He has discovered and characterized the first cases of the evolutionary transfer of gene function from the mitochondrion or chloroplast to the nucleus within modern eukaryotic evolution. Much of our understanding of the structure and evolution of chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes in plants is derived from his studies. Palmer also pioneered the application of DNA-level variation to the elucidation of evolutionary relationships among plants. He has a bachelor of arts degree in biology from Swarthmore College and a doctorate from Stanford University. Before joining the IU faculty in 1989, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and at Duke University. He was the Arthur F. Thurnau assistant and associate professor of molecular genetics at the University of Michigan.
Starker, one of a dozen professors recognized for their efforts in fine arts, has been a member of the IU School of Music faculty since 1958. Starker received his music education at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary. He is a member of the Royal Academy of London, England, and the American Federation of Musicians. He has been a solo cellist with the Budapest Opera, Dallas Symphony, Metropolitan Opera, and Chicago Symphony, and he continues to concertize extensively on all continents. Among his many honors are a 1998 Best Instrumental Soloist Performance Grammy Award for his recording of the Bach suites for solo cello, the Grand Prix du Disque, the George Washington Award, the Sanford Fellowship, the Kodaly Commemorative Medallion, the Arturo Toscanini Award and the Tracy Sonneborn Award. He has more than 120 performance recordings released by Angel, Phillips, Mercury, Decca, Deutsche-Grammonphon, RCA, Delos and other companies.
For more information on AAAS, go to the organization's Web site at http://www.amacad.org/
(George Vlahakis, Office of Communications and Marketing, 812-855-0846, gvlahaki@indiana.edu)