Five NYU Professors Chosen to Join Prestigious NAS and AAAS
Two NYU Faculty Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Professors Helmut Hofer of NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Anthony Movshon, professor and director at NYU’s Center for Neural Science, were recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Hofer and Movshon were among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from nine countries who were elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Hofer, who has been a professor of mathematics at Courant since 1997, focuses on symplectic geometry, dynamical systems, and partial differential equations. He came to NYU from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Previously, Hofer was on the faculties of the University of Bath, Rutgers University, and Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum.
Movshon, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology and a former Howard Hughes Investigator, is best known for his path breaking work on how the brain encodes and decodes visual information and in the mechanisms that put that information to use in the control of behavior. Movshon, who is also an adjunct professor at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, joined the faculty in 1975.
Both Hofer and Movshon are Silver Professors, a designation given to outstanding scholars in the Faculty of Arts and Science. These endowed professorships were made possible by a $175 million gift from the estate of Julius Silver, an NYU alumnus who served as chairman of the executive committee of Polaroid.
The National Academy
of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to
the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a Congressional
act of incorporation signed by President Abraham Lincoln that calls on the
academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government in any matter
of science or technology.
AAAS Elects Three NYU Faculty as 2008 Fellows
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) elected three NYU faculty as Fellows, the organization announced in late April. They are: Richard Pildes of the School of Law, Elliot Wolfson of the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Jorge Castañeda, a Distinguished Global Professor of Politics, who was elected as a foreign honorary member.
The three are among 190 new Fellows and 22 new foreign honorary members. Other new fellows include Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens and Academy Award-winning filmmakers Joel (TSOA ’78) and Ethan Coen.
Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law and co-director of the Center on Law and Security at the law school. His publications include The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process and When Elections Go Bad: The Law of Democracy and the 2000 Presidential Election, both co-authored volumes.
Wolfson, the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, has published extensively in the area of Jewish mysticism and philosophy in the medieval and modern eras. His books include Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination and Venturing Beyond: Morality and Law in Kabbalistic Mysticism.
Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico, holds an appointment in NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His publications include Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen, and he is a regular columnist for the Mexican daily Reforma and Newsweek International.
Founded in 1780, AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Albert Einstein.
—James Devitt