4/23/97
CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558
Nine faculty members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of their "distinguished contributions to science, scholarship, public affairs and the arts."
The new members, who were elected April 11, are B. Douglas Bernheim, professor of economics; Steven Boxer, professor of chemistry; Uta Francke, professor of genetics and of pediatrics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; Martin Perl, professor of physics; Marjorie Perloff, professor of English; Condoleezza Rice, professor of political science and provost; Renato Rosaldo, professor of anthropology; Paul M. Sniderman, professor of political science; and James A. Spudich, professor of biochemistry and developmental biology.
The nine are among 151 new fellows and 14 foreign honorary members elected this year to the academy, which was founded in 1780. The academy includes more than 4,000 fellows and honorary members.
Bernheim, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Economics, is a leading theorist in public finance, especially regarding public policy on savings, capital accumulation and taxation. His work has included empirical investigations of people's savings behavior and bequest motives as well as the effects of federal deficits and, most recently, of economic education in the workplace. He is frequently quoted in the press as the author of the Merrill Lynch Baby Boom Retirement Index, an annual survey that tracks the savings habits of people born between 1946 and 1964.
A graduate of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bernheim joined Stanford's faculty in 1982. After stints on the faculties of Northwestern and Princeton, he returned to Stanford in 1995.
Boxer, professor of chemistry, conducts research concerning the relationship of structure and function in biological molecules. Much of this work is concerned with membrane proteins. He was one of the pioneers in applying recombinant DNA techniques to the study of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. Most recently his research group has developed a way to apply techniques from semiconductor fabrication to create chips containing millions of tiny membranes. The technique holds considerable promise as a new research tool and could provide an alternative approach for cell and drug screening.
He serves as chair of the Graduate Biophysics Program and has received several teaching awards, a Presidential Young Investigator Award and research awards from the American Society for Photobiological Research and the American Chemical Society.
Francke is a professor of genetics and of pediatrics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. Her research focuses on Marfan syndrome, a heritable disorder that leads to skeletal, eye and cardiovascular problems and affects one in 10,000 people worldwide. Her recent investigations aim to identify patients whose aortas are likely to fail as a result of an abnormality linked to Marfan syndrome. Francke works with Marfan patients at Stanford's multidisciplinary Center for Marfan Syndrome and Related Connective Tissue Disorders.
Francke received an M.D. in 1967 following studies at universities in Frankfurt, Marburg and Munich, Germany. She completed a residency in pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles and postdoctoral fellowships in medical genetics at the University of California-Los Angeles and at UC-San Diego. From 1978 to 1988, she served on the Yale University medical faculty. In 1989 Francke joined Stanford as a professor and an HHMI investigator. She directs Stanford's interdepartmental Medical Genetics Training Program. Francke is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of the 1996 National Marfan Foundation's Antoine Marfan Award.
Perl, professor of physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, received the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for his key role in discovering that the electron has a relative some 3,500 times heavier called the tau. Discovery of the tau was the first sign that a third set of four fundamental particles exists. The discovery of this third family was important for physicists' confidence in the standard model, the present theoretical model for understanding the properties of nature's smallest constituents.
Perl has received the Wolf Prize in physics and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received an honorary degree from the University of Chicago and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Perloff, the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities in the English department, is known for her work in modernism, contemporary poetry and comparative literature. A specialist in 20th-century British, Continental and American poetry, she also has written widely about the relationship of the verbal to the visual arts, especially with respect to the early 20th-century avant garde. She often addresses the question: How does poetry relate to the now all-pervasive media, especially television and computers? Perloff established her reputation with critical studies of William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell and Frank O'Hara. Since then, she has written about modernism and its development into postmodernism in the second half of the century.
Perloff attended Oberlin College and earned her master's degree at Barnard College and her doctorate at the Catholic University of America. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1986, she taught at the University of Southern California, the University of Maryland and the Catholic University of America. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At Stanford, she teaches courses in English and modern thought and literature.
Rice, a professor of political science and the university's provost, is a leading analyst of the politics of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. She also does comparative study of military institutions and international security policy and was involved in making that policy for the Bush administration as senior director of Soviet and East European affairs for the National Security Council and as special assistant to Bush on national security.
A graduate of the University of Denver and Notre Dame, Rice joined the Stanford political science faculty in 1981 and served as assistant director of the Center for International Security and Arms Control.
Rosaldo, the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, has been influential in reorienting the methods and theories of anthropology. His numerous publications on theories and methods and Philippine and Southeast Asian ethnology have been widely read by historians and literary scholars as well as anthropologists. His recent work has included study of varied ideas of "cultural citizenship" within American society.
A Stanford professor since 1970, he has directed the Stanford Center for Chicano Research and chaired the anthropology department. He is a graduate of Harvard.
Sniderman, Stanford professor of political science and a research scholar at the University of California-Berkeley's Survey Research Center, is an expert on political psychology and large-scale public opinion surveys. In recent years, he has probed American's racial attitudes in particular and how they affect voting behavior.
Sniderman is the co-author of Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology, a 1991 book that won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association. Sniderman is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the University of California-Berkeley. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1972.
Spudich is professor and chair of biochemistry and a professor of developmental biology. His research focuses on the molecular basis of muscle contraction and cell movement, working out the fundamental relationships between actin and myosin proteins that interact to power all sorts of movement, from cell division to the blink of an eye. A pioneer in the field of molecular motors, he determined the roles of myosin in nonmuscle cells and provided a better molecular understanding of how myosin converts the chemical energy of ATP hydrolysis into mechanical motion and force production.
Spudich received a doctorate in biochemistry at Stanford in 1968 and pursued postdoctoral studies at Stanford and at Cambridge University, England. In 1977, after six years on the faculty of the University of California-San Francisco's biochemistry and biophysics department, he joined the Stanford faculty as a professor of cell biology. Spudich, the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Cardiovascular Disease, is an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry. (Recipients of this lifetime honor are chosen by the entire membership of Germany's Max Planck Institute.) His other honors and awards include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the 1995 American Biophysical Society Award for Excellence and Leadership in the Biological Sciences and the 1996 Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award.
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