Academy
elects five professors
Five members
of the Caltech faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, joining the 177 Fellows and 30 Foreign Honorary Members
in the academy’s “class of 2002.” The academy honors “intellectual
achievement, leadership, and creativity in all fields,” and this
year’s class includes such luminaries as Senator Edward M. Kennedy,
violinist Itzhak Perlman, and Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston.
Those from
Caltech are Richard Andersen, Boswell Professor of Neuroscience; David
Anderson, professor of biology, as well as an investigator with the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); Ronald Drever, professor of physics;
Mary Kennedy, Davis Professor of Biology; and Mark Wise, McCone Professor
of High Energy Physics. Their election brings to 80 the number of Caltech
faculty who are Fellows of the academy.
Richard Andersen’s
work focuses on neural mechanisms for visual-motor integration, spatial
perception, and visual-motion analysis, and his lab recently discovered
and is currently studying a specific area of the brain that is involved
in the planning of eye movements. Andersen received his BS from UC Davis
in 1973 and his PhD from UC San Francisco in 1979, and he joined Caltech’s
faculty as Boswell Professor in 1993.
David Anderson’s
laboratory currently encompasses three major areas of investigation: the
development of the nervous system, the development of the circulatory
system, and the functional neuroanatomy of fear, with initial studies
focusing on innate fear as a behavioral system. Anderson came to Caltech
in 1986 as an assistant professor, after earning his bachelor’s degree
from Harvard in 1978 and his PhD from Rockefeller University in 1983.
He achieved the rank of full professor in 1996 and of full investigator
with HHMI in 1997.
Ron Drever’s
research interests include experimental gravitation and the detection
of gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein in his
work on general relativity. Drever has been involved with the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory, a joint Caltech and MIT project. He first
came to Caltech as a visiting associate in 1977, and joined the Institute’s
faculty as full professor in 1979. He earned his BSc (1953) and PhD (1958)
from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Mary Kennedy
and her lab are looking into the question of how brains store new information,
and in particular are studying molecular organization in synapses of the
central nervous system. She joined the Institute in 1981 as an assistant
professor, rose to full professor in 1992, and was named Davis Professor
this year. She received her BS from St. Mary’s College in 1969 and
her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1975.
The interests
of Mark Wise are wide-ranging, including particle physics, nuclear physics,
and cosmology on the one hand, and finance, specifically risk management,
on the other. He arrived at Caltech in 1982 as an assistant professor
of theoretical physics, having earned his BSc from the University of Toronto
in 1976 and his PhD from Stanford in 1980. He became full professor in
1985 and was named McCone Professor in 1992.
Founded in
1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is composed of leading
scientists, scholars, artists, business people, and public leaders from
around the world.
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