Seven scholars elected to honorary arts and sciences academy
BY LISA TREI
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), an honorary learned society, has announced election of seven Stanford scholars to its membership. They are Jonathan Bendor, Joan Bresnan, Jeremy Bulow, Robert Conquest, Andrew Fire, Avner Greif and Mark Lepper. The 2004 class includes 178 fellows and 24 foreign honorary members.
Established in 1780, the academy has always had a membership representing the best minds of each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Alexander Graham Bell in the 19th century, and Albert Einstein and Woodrow Wilson in the 20th century. The current membership of over 4,500 includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. The academy will welcome this year's new fellows and foreign honorary members during an October ceremony at its headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
This year's election brings the number of Stanford scholars serving on the academy to 222, plus four scholars affiliated with the Hoover Institution. Following is a list of the new Stanford members:
Jonathan Bendor is the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Political Economics and Organizations at the Graduate School of Business. His research has focused on three areas: theories of bounded rationality, which analyze how decision makers' cognitive constraints affect judgment and choice; problems of collective action (how uncertainty affects cooperation in both large and small prisoners' dilemmas; the evolution of norms of cooperation); and the study of bureaucracy (e.g., the causes and effects of political control; redundancy, delegation and other institutional methods of easing cognitive and informational limits faced by individual decision makers).
Bendor joined the Stanford faculty in 1979, having earned all his degrees at the University of California-Berkeley. He is a professor of political science, by courtesy, and also teaches in the university's Public Policy Program. Bendor has been a director of the Business School's doctoral program and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1999-2000. He will return to the center this year to work on a book on behavioral models of elections.
Joan Bresnan, a member of the Department of Linguistics since 1983, is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities. She earned her bachelor's degree from Reed College in 1966 and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. Bresnan's research interests include syntactic theory, the general architecture of grammar across languages, relations of syntax to the lexicon and word structure, the structure of Bantu and Australian aboriginal languages, and computational linguistics.
Generative syntacticians have viewed her early work on the syntax of comparatives as a paradigm of linguistic analysis. Her study on the interaction of phonology and syntax was the first in-depth analysis of how different components of language interact. Her work on formal grammar architecture has been incorporated into machine translation systems around the world. Furthermore, Bresnan's original work on the syntax of the Bantu languages of Africa has helped linguists better understand the architecture of universal grammar.
In recent work she has been exploring the "plasticity-of-grammar hypothesis," the notion that grammar is inherently variable and stochastic in nature, rather than categorical and algebraic, and that linguistic competence is a highly plastic cognitive system sensitively tuned to the frequencies of the environment.
In 1999, Bresnan was president of the Linguistic Society of America. From 1992 to 1997, she held the Howard H. and Jessie T. Watkins University Professorship. Bresnan's book, Lexical-Functional Syntax, was published in 2001.
Jeremy Bulow is the Richard A. Stepp Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Yale in 1975 and his doctorate from MIT in 1979. Bulow is an applied microeconomic theorist whose research focuses in particular on game theory and microeconomics. His work has made a fundamental contribution to the theory of firms in imperfectly competitive markets. He also has written academic papers on pensions, tax policy, sovereign debt and auction theory. Bulow has consulted for U.S. government and international agencies on pensions, sovereign debt and auction design, as well as for a number of private companies. He is a former Hoover National Fellow and Sloan Fellow. Bulow was chief economist of the Federal Trade Commission from late 1998 until mid-2001.
Robert Conquest, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is an authority on Joseph Stalin and Russian history. His major scholarly concern has focused on the nature of and relations between despotic and consensual cultures. He is the author of 18 books on Soviet history, politics and international affairs, including the 1968 classic The Great Terror. Other works include Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999), which analyzes the disasters of contemporary times and considers future prospects. His most recent book, The Dragons of Expectation, will be published this year. Conquest has been literary editor of the London Spectator, published a verse translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic Prussian Nights (1977) and jointly authored The Egyptologists, a novel, with Kingsley Amis. In 1977, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for light verse.
Conquest is a fellow of many American and British learned societies and institutions. He earned his degrees from Magdalen College, Oxford. During World War II, Conquest served in the British infantry and later in the British diplomatic service. He has been awarded the Order of the British Empire and a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, among other honors.
Andrew Fire, a professor of pathology and of genetics, joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. He came from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where he was a scientific staff member, and Johns Hopkins University, where he served as an adjunct professor of biology. His research focuses on a molecular understanding of genetic control and tissue diversification.
Fire graduated from MIT in 1983 with a doctorate in biology. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, he participated in the development of gene transfer technology in C. elegans. Fire has demonstrated that double-stranded RNA mediates RNA interference, explaining many biological phenomena and providing a step forward in the development of a new technique to silence gene function in other organisms, including mammals.
In 2002, Fire was awarded the Genetics Society of America Medal and the German Cancer Research Center's Meyenburg Prize. In 2003, Fire received, with his colleague Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts, the National Academy of Sciences Award in molecular biology. They were honored for inventing methods to inactivate genes by RNA interference and helping elucidate their underlying mechanism and biological function.
Avner Greif is the Bowman Family Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. Greif, an Israeli native, joined the faculty as an assistant professor of economics in 1989 after receiving a doctorate from Northwestern University.
Greif's research focuses on European economic history and the historical development of economic and political institutions. He is particularly concerned with how political, social and cultural factors affect institutions and, thereby, economic growth. He has written on such varied topics as comparative institutional development in the Muslim and the Latin worlds, the economic and political institutional foundations of the late medieval commercial expansion, the relationships between economic and political institutions and social order, the development of banking in Renaissance Florence, and the history of contract enforcement in Russia.
Methodologically, Greif pioneered combining modern microeconomic theory -- particularly game theory, contract theory and information economics -- and detailed historical analyses in the study of institutions. He thus contributed both to developments in theory and history.
Greif is co-author of the 1998 book Analytic Narratives. In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his work examining the institutional foundations of political and economic systems and how they foster or undermine trust in both politics and economic exchange.
Mark Lepper, a faculty member since 1982, is chair of the Department of Psychology and a courtesy professor in the School of Education. He earned a bachelor's degree from Stanford in 1966 and a doctorate from Yale in 1970. Lepper's main line of research examines the psychological distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation -- what leads people to enjoy and want to do some activities for their own sake, but to do other activities as a means to some other, external end -- what might be described as "play" versus "work." Lepper has looked at these different types of motivation, primarily in schools and other educational settings, asking how these motivations change as children progress through school; what can be done to make learning activities more intrinsically motivating; and how learning might be different when a student is more intrinsically (versus extrinsically) motivated.
Most recently, Lepper has examined people's feelings of choice: both the unexpectedly large benefits (for motivation and learning) of offering students choices in many situations, and the surprising negative effects of choice in other situations, such as those in which people may feel they have "too many" choices. Lepper also has examined the goals and strategies of highly effective adult tutors in order to identify successful techniques that could be taught to others. In 1979-80, Lepper was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 1990, he received the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching.
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