Accolades

James Cronin, University Professor Emeritus in Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics and winner of a 1980 Nobel Prize in physics, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. Cronin is one of 47 new members who were elected to the society at its annual general meeting. He will serve the society’s mathematical and physical sciences class.

The American Philosophical Society was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin and is devoted to the advancement of scientific and scholarly inquiry. Members are organized into five classes: mathematical and physical sciences; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities and the arts; and learned professions and public affairs.

This past summer, Dr. Wallace Mendelson, Professor in Psychiatry, Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, received the William C. Dement Academic Achievement Award from the American Sleep Disorders Association. Mendelson was honored for his lifetime contributions to the field of sleep medicine. Dement, one of the pioneers of sleep research, earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from Chicago and established the world’s first clinical sleep disorders clinic at the University Hospitals.

Robert Nelson, Professor in Art History, recently was chosen a 1999-2000 Getty Scholar by the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Nelson will research Byzantine art and the history and practice of art history, looking in particular at the church of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople.

Scholars and artists were selected by the Getty based on the significance of their work in relation to the 1999-2000 theme, “Humanities in Comparative, Historical Perspective,” which focuses on the development of art history as a discipline in the context of the humanities.

Nelson also is Chairman of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University.

Three faculty members, Larry Hedges, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Education, Psychology and Sociology; Per Mykland, Associate Professor in Statistics; and Michael Stein, Professor and Chair of Statistics, were elected fellows of the American Statistical Association at the annual meetings of the ASA in August.

Hedges was elected for his role in the development of statistical methodology in education, evaluation and assessment, his pioneering work in meta-analysis and his editorial service to the profession. Mykland was elected for fundamental work on asymptotic expansions for martingales, for developing Bartlett-type identities for martingales and for innovative applications of artificial likelihood.

Stein was elected as an ASA fellow for fundamental contributions to the theory and applications of spatial processes, including efficient spatial prediction and the simulation of high-dimensional processes.

Mykland and Stein also were elected fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics at the ASA meetings.

Wing Hung Wong, former Professor in Statistics at Chicago and now a professor in statistics at the University of California-Los Angeles, and Valen Johnson (Ph.D., ’89), an alumnus who teaches at Duke University, were elected ASA fellows as well.

Three Divinity School professors, Catherine Brekus, Assistant Professor in the History of Christianity; Margaret M. Mitchell, Associate Professor in New Testament & Early Christian Literature; and Susan Schreiner, Associate Professor in the History of Christianity & Theology, have received Henry Luce III fellowships to continue their research, which will culminate with the publication of three new books.

Brekus is researching the life of Sarah Hagger Wheaten Osborn, an evangelist who lived in Newport, R.I., during the 18th century. The book is titled Sarah Osborn’s World: Popular Christianity in Eighteenth-Century America. Mitchell is completing her book The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom’s Portraits of the Apostle Paul, which emphasizes the verbal portraits of Paul’s body, soul and life that Chrysostom constructed in the course of his biblical homilies and other writings. Schreiner is studying the problem of certainty in a book titled Are You Alone Wise?: The Quest for Certainty in the Era of the Reformation and its Challenge to the End of Modernity. The book will explore the search for certitude as manifested on the eve of the Reformation and throughout the 16th century.