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May 8, 2002

Media Contact: Jan Jennings (858) 822-1684, jnjennings@ucsd.edu

FIVE UCSD PROFESSORS ELECTED TO ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES

Five professors at the University of California, San Diego have been elected to  membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Class of 2002. They are Mark H. Thiemens, Nicholas Canaday Spitzer, Jerold M. Olefsky, Theodore Groves, and Mark J. Machina.

The UCSD professors are among 177 new Fellows from across the nation and 30 Foreign Honorary Members named to the academy, an international society of the world’s leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people, and public leaders.

“Election to the American Academy is the result of a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to all scholarly fields and professions,” said academy president Patricia Meyer Spacks.

The UCSD scholars, their field, and academy comments:

·        Thiemens is dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD. He is praised by the academy as an “environmental scientist whose discovery and subsequent development and application of mass independent isotopic effects has had a profound impact on the environmental sciences.”

·        Spitzer is a professor of biology and chair of the neurobiology section of the UCSD Division of Biological Sciences. He has “carried out fundamental work on how neurons differentiate and showed the importance of spontaneous activity and calcium transients for development.”

·        Olefsky is a professor of medicine who has “combined basic science research with clinical investigation to advance our understanding of diabetes mellitus.”

·        Groves is a professor of economics and “the co-discoverer of the Demand Revealing Mechanism, important to the study of incentive compatibility and mechanism design.”

·        Machina is a professor of economics who “works on the theory of choice under uncertainly and has improved our understanding of behavior that is observed in reality but does not conform to classical theory.”

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, and John Hancock and was chartered “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” It has a current membership of 3,700 American Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members. This includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Among its goals is to honor excellence by electing to membership men and women in fields ranging from mathematics to medicine, computer science to literary criticism, and public affairs to the performing arts.

New members will be welcomed at the annual Induction Ceremony at academy headquarters in Cambridge Oct. 5. For further information on the academy or its members call Suzanne Morse at (617) 576-5047.