NEWS RELEASE

5/13/03

Dawn Levy, News Service: (650) 725-1944, dawnlevy@stanford.edu

Relevant Web URLs:
http://www.amacad.org/news/new2003.htm

American Academy of Arts and Sciences elects seven Stanford scholars

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), an honorary learned society, has announced election of seven Stanford scholars to its membership. They are Thomas Cover, Gretchen Daily, Thomas C. Grey, Iain Johnstone, Kenneth Judd, Ellen Markman and Douglas McAdam.

The 2003 class of 187 fellows and 29 foreign honorary members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners and four Pulitzer Prize winners. Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, journalist Walter Cronkite, recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby and novelist Michael Cunningham are among the new 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.

This year's election brings the total number of Stanford faculty serving on the academy to 222, plus an additional four affiliated with the Hoover Institution. The new Stanford members follow:

Thomas M. Cover, the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the School of Engineering, holds a joint appointment in the departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering. He has made key contributions to the fields of information theory, mathematical statistics, pattern recognition and investment theory. His work in information theory has influenced wireless communication, data compression and even the theory of stock market investment. His development of the "nearest-neighbor rule," which quantifies the notion that objects that look alike are alike, is fundamental in the theory of pattern recognition. In 1964, he earned his doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford and joined the faculty here. In 1972, he became a professor in the Statistics and Electrical Engineering departments and introduced the concept of superposition in broadcast channels, which made it possible to send information simultaneously from one transmitter to multiple receivers. While at Stanford, he served as a contract statistician for the California State Lottery from 1986 to 1994 and directed Stanford's Information Systems Laboratory from 1988 to 1996. Cover is co-author of a benchmark textbook on modern information theory and about 115 technical articles. In 1990, the Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) gave him the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in information theory. He is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the IEEE, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Gretchen C. Daily, associate professor (research) of biological sciences and senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies, is an ecologist working to develop a scientific basis for managing Earth's life support systems. Her research focuses on the future course of extinction, the delivery of ecosystem services and novel opportunities for biodiversity conservation. In addition to conducting field studies in Costa Rica, Mexico and other countries, Daily collaborates with economists, lawyers, business people and government agencies to incorporate environmental issues into business practice and government policy. Daily received her doctoral degree from Stanford and earned the Frances Lou Kallman Award for Excellence in Science and Graduate Study (1992). She was named a Pew Fellow in Conservation and the Environment (1994), a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program (1999) and a Nature Conservancy David H. Smith Senior Scholar (2003). Daily also has served on a subcommittee of the Presidential Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and on other panels and committees for the United Nations, the World Bank, private foundations and scientific institutions. Recipient of the 21st Century Scientist Award in 2000, Daily has written three books: The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable, co-authored with Katherine Ellison; Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems; and The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Solution to the Human Dilemma, co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

Thomas C. Grey, the Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Law, is a scholar in constitutional law and jurisprudence whose varied work has had an impact on thinking both about the interpretation of the American constitution and about the interaction between formalism and pragmatism in American legal thought. He is well known for a series of studies on judicial development of rights not specified in the constitutional text and another on the legal thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He also has written a book on Wallace Stevens as a lawyer-poet. Grey joined the Law School faculty in 1971, became a tenured professor in 1978, and has held his endowed position since 1990. A native of San Francisco, Grey earned a bachelor's degree from Stanford in 1963, and a bachelor's as a Marshall Scholar from Oxford University in 1965. After receiving a law degree from Yale in 1968, he clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Grey has written many articles, the most recent of which is "Judicial Review and Legal Pragmatism," just published in the Wake Forest Law Review. At Stanford, Grey teaches torts and jurisprudence.

Iain M. Johnstone is a professor of statistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences and of biostatistics in the Medical School. His work in theoretical statistics aims to provide insight into methods of data analysis that find application in many areas of science and medicine. He has used ideas from harmonic analysis, such as wavelets, to understand noise-reduction methods in statistical signal and image processing. More recently, he also has applied random matrix theory to the study of high-dimensional multivariate statistical methods. In biostatistics, he has collaborated extensively with investigators in cardiology and prostate cancer. A native of Australia, Johnstone received his doctorate in statistics from Cornell in 1981. He joined the Stanford faculty that year and served as chair of the Statistics Department from 1994 to 1997. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997-1998), Presidents' Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (1995), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1988-1990), Presidential Young Investigator Award (1985-1991) and Guy Medal in Bronze (1995) from the Royal Statistical Society, of which he is a member. He has served as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and as an adviser to the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Kenneth L. Judd is the Paul H. Bauer Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is an expert in the economics of taxation, imperfect competition and mathematical economics. His current research focuses on tax policy and antitrust issues, as well as developing computational methods for economic modeling. He is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and an associate editor of Computational Economics. Judd has published articles in several academic journals including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Economic Theory. Judd has contributed chapters to collected volumes including "The Impact of Tax Reform in Modern Dynamic Economies" in Transition Costs of Fundamental Tax Reform (2001). His influential book, Numerical Methods in Economics, was published in 1998. Judd is a fellow of the Econometric Society and served as a member of the Economics Panel of the National Science Foundation from 1986 to 1988. Before joining the Hoover Institution in 1988, Judd was a visiting professor of business economics at the University of Chicago. He also has worked at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Judd graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 with undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science. He received two master's degrees from Wisconsin in mathematics and economics in 1977 and 1980, and a doctorate in 1981.

Ellen M. Markman, the Lewis M. Terman Professor, has been a member of the Psychology Department since 1975. Markman, who holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, is viewed as one of the nation's leading developmental psychologists. The primary focus of her research has been cognitive and early language development, most specifically in determining how very young children, particularly infants, figure out what words mean. In 1983, she co-edited Volume 3 of the Handbook of Child Psychology, which at the time was hailed as the most important single publication in the field for the previous 15 years. Her 1989 book, Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction, has greatly influenced the field and is widely cited. Markman also has produced a sizable body of articles, many of which have appeared in top journals such as Cognitive Psychology, Cognition, Child Development and Developmental Psychology. She teaches both undergraduates and graduates, and has served as an adviser and mentor to many doctoral students, a number of whom have gone on to become leaders in the field. Markman was chair of the Department of Psychology from 1994 to 1997, and was associate dean for the social sciences in the School of Humanities and Sciences from 1998 to 2000.

Douglas McAdam, professor of sociology, has been director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences since 2001. He is a scholar of social movements and collective action ranging from spontaneous protests and strikes to organized social movements to revolutions. McAdam is the author or co-author of eight books and more than 50 articles in political sociology. His 1982 book, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, has become the benchmark of careful, high-quality empirical work on the origin and development of a social movement while introducing a new theoretical perspective focusing on political processes. Another book, Freedom Summer, was awarded the 1990 C. Wright Mills Award. McAdam earned his bachelor's degree in sociology from Occidental College in 1973 and his doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979. He subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Arizona, where he remained until he came to Stanford in 1998. McAdam was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1992 and 1998, and co-directed two center-sponsored summer institutes in 1994 and 2000. McAdam teaches Introduction to Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Movements and a freshman seminar, Making Sense of the Sixties.

With reporting by Dawn Levy, Mark Shwartz and Lisa Trei.

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