AAS Members Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

This post is adapted from a press release issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced the election of its new members for 2019. The new class of more than 200 members recognizes the outstanding achievements of individuals in academia, the arts, business, government, and public affairs.

Among those newly elected are the following AAS members (pictured left to right):

• Natalie M. Batalha (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• Eugene Chiang (University of California, Berkeley)
• Debra M. Elmegreen (Vassar College)

"One of the reasons to honor extraordinary achievement is because the pursuit of excellence is so often accompanied by disappointment and self-doubt," said David W. Oxtoby, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "We are pleased to recognize the excellence of our new members, celebrate their compelling accomplishments, and invite them to join the Academy and contribute to its work."

The Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good. The Academy's dual mission remains essentially the same 239 years later with honorees from increasingly diverse fields and with the work focused on the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.

"With the election of these members, the Academy upholds the ideals of research and scholarship, creativity and imagination, intellectual exchange and civil discourse, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge in all its forms," said President Oxtoby.

See the Complete List of New Academy Members

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony in October 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and join the company of Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the 18th century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the 19th; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966) in the 20th; and more recently Antonin Scalia (2003), Michael Bloomberg (2007), John Lithgow (2010), Judy Woodruff (2012), and Bryan Stevenson (2014).