printable versionSix professors, including president, elected to American Philosophical Society
Gretchen Daily
John Hennessy
Roger Kornberg
James McClelland
Claude Steele
Irving Weissman
Six professors, including President John Hennessy, have been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States.
Founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of "promoting useful knowledge," the society honors and engages leading scholars, scientists and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for multidisciplinary, intellectual fellowship. It supports research and education through grants, fellowships, lectures, publications, prizes and exhibitions. Its research library of manuscripts and other collections is internationally recognized.
Some of the society's first members were George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison and John Marshall. In 1789, the Russian Princess Dashkova, president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, was the first woman elected. In the 19th century, John James Audubon, Robert Fulton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison and Louis Pasteur were members. Albert Einstein, Robert Frost and George Marshall were among the society's distinguished 20th-century members.
Today, the society has 975 elected members, 809 resident members and 166 international members from more than two-dozen foreign countries.
Following is a list of Stanford's newly elected members:
Gretchen Daily is a professor of biology and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. An ecologist by training, Daily co-founded and is a chair of the Natural Capital Project, a joint venture of the Woods Institute, the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund that is developing practical ways to quantify the economic value of ecosystems and the services they provide. Her research group studies the future course of extinctions, the resulting changes to ecosystems and new opportunities for biodiversity conservation. She is director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources and director of the Center for Conservation Biology.
John Hennessy is the president of Stanford University and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. He pioneered computer architectures in work on pipeline scheduling for reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors (as part of the MIPS project), multiprocessor design, caching and symbolic debugging. His work on MIPS has had a significant effect on the computing industry, with MIPS chips among the most common embedded processors. He is the co-author of two classic textbooks on computer architecture, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, and is known for encouraging interdisciplinary research.
Roger Kornberg, professor of structural biology and the Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor in Medicine, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his multidisciplinary research into how DNA is converted into RNA, a process known as transcription. His work has helped explain how cells express all the information in the human genome, and how that expression sometimes goes awry, leading to cancer, birth defects and other disorders.
James McClelland is a psychology professor focusing on cognitive neuroscience issues in learning, memory, language and cognitive development. He helped to develop parallel distributed processing as a solution to the problem of creating complex cognitive functions from simple neuron-like units. His recent work has been concerned with brain plasticity. He is the founding director of Stanford's Center for the Mind, Brain and Computation.
Claude Steele is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Steele's research centers on a psychological phenomenon known as "stereotype threat." He found that people's academic performance can falter when they identify with a negatively stereotyped group. He has served as president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and president of the Western Psychological Association.
Irving Weissman is the director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and the Virginia & D. K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research. His research encompasses the biology and evolution of stem cells and progenitor cells, mainly those that form the blood and brain. In 1988, he became the first to isolate an adult stem cell by isolating a blood-forming stem cell in mice.