The American Academy of Sciences and Letters recently awarded 10 scholars with Barry Prizes for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement. The prestigious annual honor, open to scholars across diverse fields and disciplines, celebrates extraordinary achievement and unwavering commitment to excellence within the arts, sciences, and learned professions. Each awardee received a $50,000 prize.
Of the 10 honorees, three are women with ties to the academic world.
Lara M. Buchak is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University in New Jersey. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2020 after teaching for a dozen years at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. She is the author of Risk and Rationality (Oxford University Press, 2013). Professor Buchak is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in philosophy and mathematics. She earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.
Jane Kamensky is the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Emerita at Harvard University. She also served as the Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Before coming to Harvard, she taught for two decades at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is the award-winning A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (W.W. Norton & Co., 2016). Dr. Kamensky holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.
Bertha Kalifon Madras is a professor of psycho-biology in the department of psychiatry and chairs the division of neuro-chemistry at Harvard Medical School. She has been on the medical school’s faculty since 1986. Her laboratory has focused on translational research, neurobiology of therapeutic and addictive substances, brain imaging, and medications development. Dr. Madras holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from McGill University in Montreal. She went on to conduct postdoctoral research at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.