Left to right: Bruce Cumings, Lars Peter Hansen, Martha McClintock, Thomas Pavel, Craig Thomson, and Wen-Hsiung Li.

Academies elect six professors from Chicago faculty

Last month, five University faculty members––Bruce Cumings, Martha McClintock, Thomas Pavel, Craig Thompson and Wen-Hsiung Li––were elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, while economist Lars Peter Hansen was selected as one of 60 distinguished new members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cumings, the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor in History, is a scholar of East Asian political economy and international history. He is perhaps most widely known for his books about Korea, including Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (1997), and the Korean War: The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (1981) and The Origins of the Korean War II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (1990). His most recent book, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (1999), was released this month by Duke University Press.

A Chicago faculty member from 1987 to 1994, Cumings rejoined the University in 1997 after serving as director of Northwestern University’s Center for International and Comparative Studies. He received his B.A. in psychology from Denison University in 1965 and his Ph.D. in political science and East Asian studies from Columbia University in 1975.

Named the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology in March, McClintock is best known for her research on the relationship between mind, behavior and the functioning of the neural and endocrine systems. Her discoveries include the first conclusive, scientific evidence of human pheromones and their effects on the timing of ovulation.

McClintock joined the Chicago faculty in 1978 and received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 1994. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1969 and her M.A. in 1972 and Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Pennsylvania.

Pavel, who came to the University last Fall Quarter as a Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures, is the author of nine books and the editor of eight collections. He also is the co-editor of the series New French Thought published by Princeton University Press. Pavel’s fields of interest are poetics and literary theory, early modern French and English literatures and 20th-century French intellectual history.

In 1992, he was recognized with the Rene Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. He also has been given the Canadian Jubiliary Medal of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II and named a French Knight of the Order of Academic Palms. Pavel began his career in 1962 as a research associate at the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. He has taught at the University of Ottawa, the Université du Quebec in Montreal, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Princeton University.

A fellow of both the American College of Physicians and the Molecular Medicine Society, Thompson, Professor in Medicine and Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Director of the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research at the University, has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and more than 50 books and monographs. He also is a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Board of Scientific Counselors and the Immunology Benchmark Panel for the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy at the National Academy of Sciences.

Thompson received his A.B. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1974, a Bachelor of Medical Science from Dartmouth Medical School in 1975 and his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977.

A pioneer in the field of molecular phylogeny, Wen-Hsiung, the George Beadle Professor in Ecology & Evolution, wrote the first textbook on the subject, Molecular Evolution, in 1997. With his mathematical and theoretical skills, Wen-Hsiung revolutionized the field of molecular phylogeny, allowing scientists to better determine through gene similarities how closely species are related. Currently, his research interests include the similarities in human DNA, the co-evolution of human growth hormone and its receptor, and the evolution of color vision.

Wen-Hsiung came to Chicago from the University of Texas at Houston, where he was the Betty Trotter professor in medical sciences. He earned his B.E. in civil engineering from the Chung-Yuang College of Science and Engineering in Taiwan in 1965, his M.S. in geophysics in 1968 from National Central University in Taiwan and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and genetics from Brown University in 1972.

Founded during the American Revolution, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a learned society committed to honoring achievement in science, scholarship, the arts and public affairs and to conducting a program of projects and studies that reflect the interests of its members and respond to the needs of society. The 153 newly elected members will join more than 3,000 fellows and 550 foreign honorary members who come from a range of intellectual disciplines and professions––the physical sciences, biological sciences, social arts and sciences, and the humanities and fine arts.

Hansen, the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his original research, which looks at ways to bridge the gap between dynamic economic theories and data. His work has led to improved methods for formulating, analyzing and testing models of dynamic economies. He has applied these methods to study the determinants of consumption, savings and security market prices.

A winner of the 1998 Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, Hansen joined the University in 1982. He graduated from Utah State University in 1974 with a B.S. in mathematics and from the University of Minnesota with a Ph.D. in economics in 1978.

The National Academy of Sciences has more than 1,800 active members and more than 300 foreign associates. Established in 1863, the academy is a private organization dedicated to furthering science and its use for general welfare. Election to the academy is one of the highest honors accorded to scientists and engineers in the United States.