4/24/96
CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558
STANFORD -- Seven 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 fellows are Thomas Ehrlich, visiting professor of international law; Joseph W. Goodman, professor of electrical engineering; David M. Kennedy, professor of history; Perry L. McCarty, professor of civil engineering; Claude M. Steele, professor of social psychology; Kathleen Sullivan, professor of law; and Barry Weingast, professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The seven are among 159 new fellows and 26 foreign honorary members elected this year to the academy, which was founded in 1780. The academy includes more than 4,000 fellows and foreign honorary members.
Thomas Ehrlich, visiting professor of international law, was dean of Stanford School of Law from 1971 to 1975. He later became provost at the University of Pennsylvania and president of Indiana University. In addition to his expertise in international law, he is an authority on legal education. He implemented changes in the Stanford law school curriculum that allowed students to work off campus or to conduct intensive research. His latest books are on higher education "ideals and realities" and on the use of force in international law.
Ehrlich is also the first California State University "distinguished scholar," a position based at San Francisco State University that allows him to teach undergraduate courses involving community service and to promote service learning throughout the Cal State system. A graduate of Harvard, Ehrlich first came to Stanford in 1965 and was vice chair of the Faculty Senate in 1969-70.
Joseph W. Goodman, the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering, has made major contributions to the field of modern optics, including optical information processing, optical imaging, holography and statistical problems in optics. His textbooks Introduction to Fourier Optics (1968) and Statistical Optics (1975) are considered classics.
His current research interests are focused on a field known as "optical interconnects," which addresses the problems involved in replacing the wires in computers with interconnections that use light rather than electrical signals.
Goodman, the author of more than 200 scientific and technical papers, has received numerous awards, including the Max Born Award and the Frederic Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America; the Education Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; and the Dennis Gabor Award of the International Optical Engineering Society. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1987.
David M. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and past chair of the history department, is considered one of America's preeminent scholars in American history. He has written on Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement, U.S. involvement in World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. His book Over Here: The First World War and American Society, won a Pulitzer Prize runner-up award in history in 1981, and he contributed to the PBS series "The American Experience." Kennedy is spending the 1995-96 academic year at Oxford University, where he is the visiting Harmsworth Professor of American History.
Perry L. McCarty, the Silas H. Palmer Professor of Civil Engineering, is a leader in research on the biological treatment of wastewater and the removal, transport and fate of toxic organic chemicals in surface and groundwaters.
McCarty currently is working on the development of biological methods to destroy chlorinated solvents in the groundwater. These solvents are a major problem at industrial and military sites throughout the country, with costs for remediation estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars. He currently is testing one such approach in the clean-up of contaminated groundwater at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California.
McCarty has written more than 280 scientific and technical papers and is co-author of the widely used textbook Chemistry for Environmental Engineering. He has been honored by various organizations, including the Water Pollution Control Federation and the American Society of Civil Engineers. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering In 1977.
Claude M. Steele, a professor of social psychology, is known for his theoretical and empirical investigations of the relationship between group stereotypes and the intellectual performance of individuals who are members of stereotyped groups. At Stanford, he has demonstrated that performance on English tests by African American undergraduates and performance on science tests by women can be influenced by how the testing situation validates or invalidates stereotypes.
Steele came to Stanford in 1993 from the University of Michigan, where he was involved in devising a university program to reduce stereotype threat to incoming freshmen. He also has done research on the behavioral consequences of alcohol consumption and the maintenance of self-esteem. He is a graduate of Hiram College and Ohio State University.
Kathleen Sullivan, a constitutional law scholar who came to Stanford in 1993 from Harvard, has been active as a litigator, presenting oral arguments and briefs before appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. She frequently provides commentary on the courts and contemporary legal issues on influential television programs such as the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour." Sullivan currently is writing a book on free speech and the First Amendment.
A graduate of Cornell, Oxford and Harvard, she practiced law and clerked for Appellate Judge James L. Oakes before joining the Harvard faculty in 1984. Her publications have covered a wide range of subjects including affirmative action, artistic freedom, religious freedom, abortion and AIDS.
Barry Weingast, who has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1987 and a professor of political science since 1992, also is a professor, by courtesy, of economics. He studies industrial organization and regulation and political theory. Trained as an economist at the California Institute of Technology, he is known in his field of political economics as the co-founder of "neo-institutionalism," which is based on his investigations into how incentives and decision-making processes affect policy.
Weingast has written a number of public policy essays, including one this year on the democratic advantage in international competition, and one last year on China's transition to markets. In 1995, he wrote a book, Institutions and Political Commitment: A New Political Economy of the American Civil War Era, and co-edited a book on the U.S. Congress.
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