American Academy Inducts Class of 2002

View the list of new Fellows and FHMs

Cambridge, MA, October 5, 2002 -- The American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members from the class of 2002 on October 5. Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks presided over the day's celebrations, which included both an orientation session and an induction ceremony. Bard College professor and novelist Chinua Achebe, National Medal of Science for Research on Mental Illness recipient Nancy C. Andreasen, United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Dean of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Philip S. Khoury, astrophysicist Edward W. Kolb, and NPR News senior analyst Daniel Schorr addressed their colleagues as newly inducted members of the Academy.

The Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The Academy 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 eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. Its current membership of over 3,700 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and fifty Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the American Academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, social policy, education, and the humanities.

This year's election maintains the Academy's practice of honoring intellectual achievement, leadership, and creativity in all fields. Former Senator Warren B. Rudman (R-New Hampshire); Nobel Prize-winning chemist George A. Olah; four college presidents, including Vassar College president Frances D. Fergusson; David A. King, chief scientific advisor to Her Majesty's government and head of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology; David A. Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration and dean of the School of Medicine at Yale; Rita R. Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation; novelist William Kennedy; U.S. Representative Amory Houghton (R-New York); Hector Garcia-Molina, chair of the department of computer science at Stanford University; Lord Anthony P. Lester, president of the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights; Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian David Levering Lewis; architect James S. Polshek; Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; and businessmen Leonard A. Lauder and Amos B. Hostetter, Jr. are also among the Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members that were inducted.

For more information about this year's new class or about the Induction Ceremony and other Academy events, please call Phyllis Bendell at (617) 576-5047 or email pbendell@amacad.org.