The American Philosophical Society was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. The society honors distinguished scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, artists, and societal leaders with membership in the society. More than 240 members of the APS have won Nobel prizes. Members have included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Frost, Thomas Edison, Sandra Day O’Connor, Charles Darwin, Toni Morrison, and Albert Einstein. Today, there are 1,019 living members of the society.
This year 27 new American members were elected to the society along with five foreign members. Of the 27 new American members this year, 10 are women and eight of these women have current ties to the academic world.
Mary C. Beckerle holds the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Endowed Chair and is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah. She also serves as the director of the Huntsman Cancer Institute and is associate vice president for cancer affairs. Dr. Berkerle is a graduate of Wells College in Aurora, New York, where she majored in biology and psychology. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of Colorado.
Anne Catherine Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She also serves as the director of the Research Program in Development Studies. Dr. Case joined the Princeton faculty in 1991. Dr. Case was the valedictorian at the University at Albany. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
Lorraine Jenifer Daston is a research associate in the department of history at the University of Chicago and the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Daston holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University. She is the co-editor of Histories of Scientific Observation (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Laura Lee Kiessling is the Laurens Anderson Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Steenbock Professor of Chemistry, and the director of the Keck Center for Chemical Genomics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Kiessling is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she majored in chemistry. She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University.
Barbara Newman is the John Evans Professor of Latin Language and Literature and a professor of English, religious studies and classics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Her most recent books are Making Love in the Twelfth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). Dr. Newman has taught at Northwestern since 1981. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. Professor Newman holds a master of divinity degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in medieval studies from Yale University.
Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor at Rice University in Houston. She is a professor of bioengineering and a professor of computer and electrical engineering. Professor Richards-Kortum is the author of the textbook Biomedical Engineering for Global Health published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Dr. Richards-Kortum is a graduate of the University of Nebraska. She holds a master’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in medical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sabine Schmidtke is a professor of Islamic intellectual history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She has been a faculty member at the institute since 2014. Earlier, she taught for 15 years at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. Dr. Schmidtke holds a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford.
Beth A. Simmons is the Andrea Mitchell University Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books including Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Professor Simmons joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 after teaching for a decade at Harvard University. Professor Simmons is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Redlands in California. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.