The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected five New York University faculty to its ranks of fellows: political scientist Nathaniel Beck; mathematics professor Jeff Cheeger; philosophy professor Kit Fine; neural scientist Joseph LeDoux; and Charles Newman, director of NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The five are among 175 new Fellows and 20 new foreign honorary members elected by AAAS. Among the newly elected are former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as well as chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.
Beck, a professor in NYU’s Department of Politics, is an expert in political methodology, serving as editor of the journal Political Analysis and twice winning the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology.
Cheeger, a faculty member in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, specializes in differential geometry and its connections to topology and analysis. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Mathematical Society.
Fine, NYU’s Silver Professor of Philosophy, specializes in metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language. He has authored Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects (Blackwell, 1985) and co-authored Worlds, Times, and Selves (Duckworth, 1977).
LeDoux, a faculty member in NYU’s Department of Neural Science, has worked on the emotion and memory in the brain for more than 20 years. His published works include The Emotional Brain (Simon and Schuster, 1998) and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (Viking, 2002).
Newman, with specialties in probability theory and statistical physics, has been director of the Courant Institute since 2002. Newman has been a Sloan fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
The Academy will welcome this year’s elected fellows at its annual induction ceremony on Oct. 7, at its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and others, AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
New York University, located in the heart of Greenwich Village, was established in 1831 and is one of America’s leading research universities and a member of the selective Association of American Universities. It is one of the largest private universities, it is a leader in attracting international students and scholars in the U.S, and it sends more students to study abroad than any other U.S. college or university. Through its 14 schools and colleges, NYU conducts research and provides education in the arts and sciences, law, medicine, business, dentistry, education, nursing, the cinematic and performing arts, music, public administration, social work, and continuing and professional studies, among other areas.