By Kimberlee Eberle-Sudré, Program Director of Education and the Development of Knowledge at the Academy

Francis Amory Prize Symposium: Advances in Reproductive Biology and Medicine

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of a broad range of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and promote innovative and evidence-based policies to address crucial issues affecting the international community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice at all levels of society.

Frank Wilczek discussed the modern concept of substance and the nature of the Higgs particle following an introduction given by Jerome Friedman.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

Members of the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT performed a staged reading of Chantal Bilodeau’s play SILA. The reading was followed by a panel discussion with Naomi Oreskes, Robert L. Jaffe, and playwright Chantal Bilodeau about the competing interests shaping the future of our planet.

On October 1, 2011, the American Academy inducted its 231st class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new members: Frances Hamilton Arnold, David Conrad Page, Sir Adam Roberts, Annette Gordon-Reed, and William I. Miller.

On a gray London morning in January, I walked past familiar markers of institutional gravity on my way to the Royal Society. Stone facades. Heavy doors. Plaques engraved with names that have outlived the controversies of their eras. It is easy, in places like this, to slip into a kind of historical reverence that feels comforting, even anesthetizing.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has published a new collection of essays, Using Imaging to Identify Deceit: Scientific and Ethical Questions, examining the scientific support for using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to recognize deception.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

Rising inequality is one of our most pressing social concerns. And it is not simply that some are advantaged while others are not, but that structures of inequality are self-reinforcing and cumulative; they become durable. The societal arrangements that in the past have produced more equal economic outcomes and social opportunities – such as expanded mass education, access to social citizenship and its benefits, and wealth redistribution – have often been attenuated and supplanted by processes that are instead inequality-inducing.

What are the lessons learned when community college leaders, researchers, area employers, policymakers and philanthropists get together to discuss how to provide postsecondary students with the skills they need for meaningful employment?

The Academy’s record of distinction in Science, Engineering, and Technology dates to its founding mission “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Rather than generate new scientific research, the role of the Academy has been uniquely interdisciplinary, bridging the social sciences and arts with the physical sciences to support a national understanding, belief, and trust in science and discovery. Perhaps no better example of this can be found than in the mid-1800s when the Academy hosted hotly contested debates about a new scientific theory: the theory of evolution.

The Summer 2019 issue of Daedalus, “Inequality as a Multidimensional Process,” guest edited by Michèle Lamont and Paul Pierson, draws on a wide range of expertise to better understand and examine how economic conditions are linked to other social, psychological, political, and cultural processes that can either counteract or reinforce durable inequalities.

On June 6, 2012, Internet pioneers Tom Leighton, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and David D. Clark discussed the future of the Web. The meeting, presented in collaboration with the Royal Society and the British Consulate-General, was the inaugural program in a lecture series on ‘GREAT Science,’ organized by the U.K. government’s Science and Innovation Network to profile international science excellence.

For the 235th time, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has inducted its newest class of members. One of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent research centers, the Academy includes among this year’s 147 inductees prominent scientists, artists, literary figures, and leaders of academic, business, philanthropic, and cultural institutions from across the United States and internationally.