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Three IUB faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
May 8, 2000
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Three Indiana University faculty from the Bloomington campus have joined a distinguished list of their national colleagues in one of the most prestigious academic organizations in the world.
Two IU School of Music faculty members, Martina Arroyo, Distinguished Professor of Voice, and Menahem Pressler, the Dean Charles H. Webb Chair in Music and Distinguished Professor of Music, and Rudolf Raff, professor of biology and director of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute, were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
They bring to 13 the total number of Bloomington faculty selected over the years for this national organization, which recognizes excellence in the arts and sciences.
Pressler, an IU faculty member since 1955, is internationally recognized as a pianist and is a co-founder and member of the renowned Beaux Arts Trio. He is active worldwide as a soloist and chamber musician and has performed with many of the world's leading orchestras and string quartets.
Pressler has received numerous awards, including England's Record of the Year Award, four Grammy nominations, Musical America's Ensemble of the Year award in 1997 with the Beaux Arts Trio, and the German Recording Award. He was a winner of the Debussy Competition in San Francisco and has served as a juror for the Van Cliburn and Queen Elisabeth competitions. He regularly presents master classes worldwide. He has recorded almost the entire chamber literature with piano on the Philips label.
Arroyo, who joined the IU music faculty in 1993, is an internationally recognized opera singer and concert artist. She opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera on three occasions and has performed at the Paris Opera, Covent Garden in London, Buenos Aires' Teatro Colon, Milan's La Scala, the Hamburg State Opera and the Vienna State Opera.
Arroyo has sung with leading orchestras in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Rome and Berlin. She has been honored by the American Council for the Arts, served as a member of the National Endowment of the Arts, and is an Honorary Trustee of Carnegie Hall. She has made more than 50 recordings of major operas and orchestral performances.
Raff, who joined the IU faculty in 1971, is a pioneer in creating a new field called evolutionary developmental biology. This involves combining changes in evolution, from one species to another over many generations, with changes in development, from embryo to adult in a single generation, to understand how new animal forms evolve.
His work involves three kinds of projects: using genes to understand relationships among different kinds of organisms, determining how the evolutionary transformation in body design happens, and determining the mechanisms by which evolutionary changes in embryos occur.
The American Academy of Arts and Science was founded more than 200 years ago. George Washington was among the founders. The organization annually honors leading intellectuals from both the United States and abroad. It has a membership of 3,500 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members. The three faculty members will be formally inducted in October ceremonies at the organization's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
(Richard Doty, 812-855-0084, rgdoty@indiana.edu)