Faculty among new academy members

Three faculty members named to National Academy of Sciences Three University faculty members -- mathematician William Fulton, molecular geneticist Susan Lindquist and theoretical astrophysicist Michael Turner -- are among 60 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Election to membership in the academy, which recognizes "distinguished and continuing achievements in original research," is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer.

Fulton, the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics, is a specialist in algebraic geometry. A member of the Chicago faculty since 1987, he is spending the 1996-97 academic year in Sweden as the Erlander Professor at the Mittag-Leffler Institute near Stockholm. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 1996 he was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition by the American Mathematical Society. He is the managing editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

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. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been on the University faculty since 1978.

Turner, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute, specializes in Big Bang cosmology and particle physics. He is the author of nearly 200 articles in his field, and also lectures and writes extensively for the general public. A member of the NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Center at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Turner studies the first moments after the Big Bang, when temperatures were so high that matter behaved like the particles that collide in today's high-energy accelerators. A University faculty member since 1980, he is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfield Prize from the American Physical Society.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to furthering science and its use for the general welfare. The academy was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that calls on the academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.