Five From NYU Elected 2009 AAAS Fellows

      The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) elected five members of the NYU community as 2009 Fellows this spring: Robert Berne, NYU’s senior vice president for health and a professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service; Michael John Laver, a professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics; Theodor Meron, a professor emeritus in the School of Law; J. Anthony Movshon, a professor of neural science and psychology; and Matthew S. Santirocco, dean of the College of Arts and Science and a professor of classics.
      The five are among 210 new Fellows and 19 new foreign honorary members elected. Other new Fellows include U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris. AAAS will welcome this year’s Fellows at an induction ceremony on Oct. 10 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A complete list of the new members is available at www.amacad.org/enewsletter/a.pdf.
      As senior vice president for health, Berne is responsible for working with deans and other university leaders on long-term academic, financial, and operational strategies for the wide range of health activities at NYU. A scholar of public education policy and financing, he furnished expert analysis and testimony in the landmark school finance case, CFE v. the State of New York. Berne has authored The Relationships Between Financial Reporting and the Measurement of Financial Condition and co-authored The Measurement of Equity in School Finance, Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization, and The Financial Analysis of Governments.
      Laver is a renowned analyst of party competition and the politics of government formation. His books include The Politics of Private Desires, Multiparty Government, and Making and Breaking Governments. Laver served as sole political scientist on the Irish Constitution Review Group, whose work led to reforms in the Irish Constitution, and as an advisor to both an all-party committee seeking reforms to the Irish Senate and a government-appointed commission evaluating the introduction of electronic voting in Ireland.
      Meron, the Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and a judicial Fellow at the School of Law, is a leading scholar of international human rights and international criminal law. He was the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) until 2005 and also served as a judge in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Meron, whose published works include International Law in the Age of Human Rights and The Humanization of International Law, is currently a judge on the ICTY’s Appeals Chamber.
      Movshon, director of NYU’s Center for Neural Science, 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. A faculty member in the Department of Psychology, Movshon is a former Howard Hughes Investigator and an adjunct professor at NYU Langone Medical Center. At NYU, he is a Silver Professor, a designation given to outstanding scholars in the Faculty of Arts and Science.
      Santirocco, who is also the Angelo J. Ranieri Director of Ancient Studies and associate provost for undergraduate academic affairs at NYU, maintains research interests in Latin literature, Greek poetry, and the classical tradition. He edits the professional journal Classical World and is the founder and director of NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies. His publications include a book on Latin lyric poetry (Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes), edited volumes of essays on the classical tradition (Latinitas: The Tradition and Teaching of Latin), and a book on Horace (Reconsidering Horace), as well as many scholarly articles.
      —James Devitt