Eight faculty members elected to academy

The new fellows are animal behaviorist Jeanne Altmann, law experts Douglas Baird and Michael McConnell, geneticists Brian Charlesworth and Susan Lindquist, political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, paleontologist David Raup and astrophysicist Michael Turner. They are among 125 University faculty members who are current members of the academy.

Of 159 new fellows, 13 are from Harvard, 11 from Berkeley and 10 from Stanford. Four of the elected fellows are from Yale, and three are from Princeton.

Two University Trustees also were elected to the academy: Richard Franke, chairman and chief executive officer of John Nuveen and Company Inc., and Howard Krane, Chairman of the Board of Trustees and a partner with Kirkland & Ellis.

Altmann, Professor in Ecology & Evolution and Chairman of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, studies the behavior of nonhuman primates, especially baboons. She and her husband, Stuart Altmann, Professor Emeritus in Ecology & Evolution, have spent 24 years studying baboons in Amboseli National Park in Kenya, analyzing sources of variability within groups and examining patterns of stability among groups and populations and across time. She has also begun studies of a variety of species in captivity at Brookfield Zoo.

A University alumna, she received her Ph.D. in behavioral sciences from Chicago in 1979 and was a research associate in biology before joining the faculty in 1985. She is a fellow and past president of the Animal Behavior Society and has served on several advisory committees for the National Science Foundation. She is also research curator and associate curator of primates for the Chicago Zoological Society.

Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Professor and Dean of the Law School, is one of the nation's leading experts on bankruptcy and corporate reorganization. Baird's scholarly work involves the exploration of bankruptcy law in the context of modern corporate finance theory. His most recent books on the subject are Game Theory and the Law (1994) and The Elements of Bankruptcy (1992).

He received his J.D. from Stanford in 1979. Before coming to Chicago, Baird was a law clerk to Judge Shirley Hufstedler and Judge Dorothy Nelson, both of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He joined the University faculty in 1980 and has been Dean since 1994.

Charlesworth, the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor in Ecology & Evolution, is a population geneticist. He is best known for his theoretical studies on the evolution of separate sexes and for his experiments with fruit flies on the population dynamics of transposable elements -- pieces of DNA that move from one chromosome location to another. He is the author of Evolution in Age-structured Populations (1980).

A fellow of the Royal Society of London, Charlesworth received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1969 and then was a postdoctoral fellow at Chicago for two years before returning to England. He joined the University faculty in 1985.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor in the Divinity School, is a political and social critic whose work focuses on the connections between political and ethical convictions. She is the author of more than 200 essays in scholarly journals and journals of civic opinion as well as several books. One of her recent books, Democracy on Trial (1995), focuses on the place of institutions and individuals in a democratic society. She received a Guggenheim fellowship to work on an intellectual biography of Jane Addams, currently in progress.

She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1973. Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1995, she was professor of philosophy and the Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.

Lindquist, Professor in Molecular Genetics & Cellular Biology and an investigator in the University's Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is an authority on the heat-shock response. The most highly conserved genetic regulatory system known, the heat-shock response is used by plants and animals to protect themselves from environmental stresses such as heat or certain toxins. Lindquist is the author or co-author of more than 80 research papers and review articles and the co-editor of two books on the topic.

She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976, the same year she came to Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow. She joined the University faculty in 1978. Lindquist has served on committees for the National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture.

McConnell, the William B. Graham Professor in the Law School, is an expert on the separation of church and state, economic rights and regulations, and the allocation of powers in a federation. He is perhaps best known for his work on the history and interpretation of free exercise of religion.

After receiving his J.D. from Chicago in 1979, he served as law clerk to J. Skelly Wright, then Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Circuit, and to Justice William Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the University faculty in 1985, he served as assistant general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget, and in the solicitor general's office at the Department of Justice, where he argued six cases before the Supreme Court. From 1988 to 1990, he was a member of the president's Intelligence Oversight Board.

David Raup, the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences, is a world-renowned paleontologist and an authority on evolution and mass extinctions. He has studied the long-term patterns of life on earth and how impacts from extraterrestrial bodies such as comets or asteroids may have caused mass extinctions. He is the author of several books, including The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science (1986) and Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (1991).

A 1953 graduate of the College, Raup received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Harvard. After teaching at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Rochester, he returned to Chicago as a Visiting Professor in 1977 and joined the University faculty in 1980. From 1978 to 1982, he was chairman of geology and then dean of sciences at the Field Museum of Natural History. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Michael Turner, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics and a member of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at Fermilab, is an expert on the Big Bang and the evolution of the universe. He has contributed significantly to the theoretical understanding of the early universe, particularly with respect to the so-called "missing matter." His books include The Early Universe (1983), with co-author Edward Kolb, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Turner received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Stanford, the same year he came to Chicago as an Enrico Fermi Fellow. He joined the University faculty in 1980. A past recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship, he is also a fellow of the American Physical Society.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams and other leaders of the young American republic. Today the academy includes more than 4,000 fellows and foreign honorary members from a broad range of geographic, professional and cultural backgrounds. Among its fellows are 160 Nobel laureates and 64 Pulitzer Prize winners.