Eight faculty named to 2006 class of AAAS Fellows

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) recently announced the election of 175 new fellows and 20 new foreign honorary members. Included among this new field of fellows are eight Harvard faculty members.

The academy will welcome this year’s new fellows and foreign honorary members at its annual induction ceremony in October at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Fellows and foreign honorary members are nominated and elected to the academy by current members. A broad-based membership, composed of scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs, and business, gives the academy a unique capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary studies and public policy research.

Harvard’s new AAAS inductees include Charles R. Alcock, professor of astronomy and director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Alberto Alesina, the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy; Richard H. Fallon Jr., the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor in Constitutional Law; William A. Graham, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, the John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity, and the Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies; Mark Taylor Keating, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of cell biology and pediatrics; Steven Miller, director of the International Security Program, Kennedy School of Government; James H. Stock, professor of economics; and Mary Waters, professor of sociology.

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields to the academy,” said AAAS President Patricia Meyer Spacks. “Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made pre-eminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.”