A Downward Trend in Election of Women to the National Academy of Sciences

Election to membership in the National Academy of Sciences is considered one of greatest honors for members of the scientific community. There are currently 2,214 active members of the academy.

Recently, the academy elected 84 new members to its ranks. Of the 84 new members, 18, or 21.4 percent, are women. A year ago, women were 26.2 percent of the new members. Two years ago, women were 31 percent of the new members.

Of the 18 women elected to the academy this year, the large majority are affiliated with research universities in the United States.

(L to R) Top row: Dora E. Angelaki, Carolina Barillas-Mury, Cynthia J. Burrows, Patricia L. Crown, Cynthia Dwork, and Kathryn Edin. Middle row: Janet Franklin, Sharon C. Glotzer, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Fiona A. Harrison, Marcia K. Johnson, and Margaret J. McFall-Ngai. Bottom row: Elsa M. Redmond, Lucia B. Rothman-Denes, Alanna Schepartz, Brenda A. Schulman, Pauline Wiessner, and Bin Yu.

Here are brief biographies of the new women members.

Dora E. Angelaki is the Wilhelmina Robertson Professor and chair of the department of neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Carolina Barillas-Mury is the chief of the Mosquito Immunity and Vector Competence Section in the Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Guatemala and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Arizona.

Cynthia J. Burrows is the Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Colorado and earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Patricia L. Crown is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She has been on the faculty at the University of New Mexico since 1993. Professor Crown is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona.

Cynthia Dwork is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. She has been with Microsoft since 2001 after working at Compaq and IBM. A graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Dwork holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University.

Kathryn Edin is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the department of sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She taught at Harvard from 2007 to 2013. A graduate of North Park University in Chicago, Professor Edin holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.

Janet Franklin is a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University in Tempe. Her work addresses the impacts of human-caused landscape change on the environment. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees, all from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sharon C. Glotzer is the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has been on the Michigan faculty since 2001. Professor Glotzer is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in physics at Boston University.

Kathleen Mullan Harris is the Gillian T. Cell Distinguished Professor in the department of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Harris is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, where she majored in computer science. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania.

Fiona A. Harrison is the Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Space Radiation Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Her research is concentrated on developing new optics and detectors for high energy astrophysics and observations of the universe in the high energy X-ray band.

Marcia K. Johnson is the Sterling Professor of Psychology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She has been at Yale since 2000 where her research is focused on human memory. Dr. Johnson holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Margaret J. McFall-Ngai is a professor of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a graduate of the University of San Francisco and holds a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Elsa M. Redmond is a research associate in the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She has been on the staff of the museum since 1991. Dr. Redmond received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Rice University and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D., both in anthropology, from Yale University.

Lucia B. Rothman-Denes is a professor of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Alanna Schepartz is the Milton Harris ‘29 Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. She also serves as director of the Yale Chemical Biology Institute. Professor Schepartz has been on the faculty at Yale since 1988. A graduate of the University at Albany of the State University of New York system, Dr. Schepartz earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Brenda A. Schulman is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and co-director of the Cancer Genetics, Biochemistry, and Cell Biology Program at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Schulman is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pauline Wiessner a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah. Professor Wiessner is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. She has taught at the University of Utah since 1998.

Bin Yu is the Chancellor’s Professor in the departments of statistics and of electrical engineering and computer science, at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been on the Berkeley faculty since 2001. Dr. Yu is a graduate of Peking University in China. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.