17 faculty elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Seventeen Harvard faculty are among 269 newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced Wednesday.

“With the election of these members, the academy is honoring excellence, innovation, and leadership and recognizing a broad array of stellar accomplishments,” said academy President David W. Oxtoby. “We hope every new member celebrates this achievement and joins our work advancing the common good.”

In 1780, the academy’s founders — including John Adams and John Hancock — envisioned an organization that would recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young nation. The first members elected to the academy in 1781 included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

Today, the academy continues to be both an honorary society, electing new members from the non-profit, private, and public sectors, and an independent policy organization with initiatives in the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.

Those elected in 2023 are drawn from academia, the arts, industry, policy, research, and science, and include more than 40 International Honorary Members (IHM) from 23 countries.

The new members join a distinguished group of individuals elected to the academy 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), Martin Luther King Jr. (1966), Stephen Hawking (1984), and Condoleezza Rice (1997) in the 20th; and, more recently, Bryan Stevenson (2014), M. Temple Grandin (2016), John Legend (2017), Viet Thanh Nguyen (2018), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020), Sanjay Gupta (2021), and Heather Cox Richardson (2022).

The Harvard inductees include

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan
Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Karen Adelman
Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School

David S. Pellman
Margaret M. Dyson Professor of Pediatric Oncology, Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School. Professor, Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School

Wade G. Regehr
Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

William Clark
Harvey Brooks Research Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development, Harvard Kennedy School

Benjamin L. Ebert
George P. Canellos, MD, and Jean S. Canellos Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School,

Elizabeth C. Engle
Professor of Neurology and Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School

Daniel Ziblatt
Eaton Professor of Government, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Carol S. Steiker
Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law,  Harvard Law School

Michèle Lamont
Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Catherine Z. Elgin
Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Susanna Siegel
Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Tiya Miles
Michael Garvey Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute

David D. Hall
Bartlett Professor of New England Church History Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School

Jacob K. Olupona
Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard Divinity School, with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Amitabh Chandra
Ethel Zimmerman Wiener Professor of Public Policy and Director of Health Policy Research, Harvard Kennedy School

Muhammad Ali Pate
Julio Frenk Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health