American Academy to Induct Class of 2003

William H. Gates, Sr., Frank Thomson Leighton, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, and Michael Wood to Speak at Induction Ceremony; Sherrill Milnes will Perform

On October 11, 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences will induct the Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members from the class of 2003 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks will preside over the day's celebrations, which will include both an orientation and an induction. The new class of 187 Fellows and 29 Foreign Honorary Members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners, and four Pulitzer Prize winners. Philanthropist William H. Gates, Sr., Akamai founder and MIT professor Frank Thomson Leighton, chemist Carolyn R. Bertozzi, and chair of Princeton University's Department of English Michael Wood will speak at the ceremony, which will also feature a performance by prominent operatic baritone Sherrill Milnes. All are members of the 2003 class of Inductees.

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 3,900 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the American Academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, American institutions, education, and the humanities.

This year's election maintains the Academy's practice of honoring intellectual achievement, leadership, and creativity in all fields. Peter Agre, who recently won the Nobel Prize in chemistry; Lawrence S. Bacow, president of Tufts University; poet Robert Creeley; Jeri Laber, senior advisor to Human Rights Watch; Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donald Glaser; Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; William Allen, director of the Center for Law & Business at New York University; botanist Stephen P. Hubbell, founder and chairman of the National Council for Science and the Environment; Sharon P. Rockefeller, president and Chief Executive Officer of Virginia's public television station WETA; writer Charles Johnson; director of the division of neuroscience at Children's Hospital Boston Michael E. Greenberg; recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby; political philosopher Michael Sandel; and Harman International executive chairman Sidney Harman are among the newly elected Fellows.

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