Five SAS Faculty Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
May 2008
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced the election of five School of Arts and Sciences faculty among its new Fellows. Marsha Lester, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Natural Sciences in the Department of Chemistry; Tom Lubensky, Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics; Diana Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication; Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English; and Robert Rescorla, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, are among 190 new Fellows and 22 Foreign Honorary Members, who are leaders in the sciences, arts and humanities, business, public affairs and the nonprofit sector.
“The recognition of faculty from across the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences speaks to the depth and breadth of scholarship in the School,” says SAS Dean Rebecca Bushnell. “I am proud to see our faculty recognized for their exceptional accomplishments.”
Dr. Lester, who is also the department chair in chemistry, joined the Penn faculty in 1982. A physical chemist, her research focuses on experimental and theoretical approaches to probe intermolecular potential energy surfaces between reactive partners. Her honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Miller Visiting Research Professorship at Berkeley, the Broida Prize of the International Symposium on Free Radicals, a National Science Foundation Career Advancement Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
Dr. Lubensky, who is also the department chair in physics and astronomy, researches soft materials such as liquid crystals, membranes, vesicles, and Langmuir films and complex fluids such as microemulsions. He was educated at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University, and he came to Penn in 1971. He has been named a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Sloan fellow and a Guggenheim fellow, and is a co-author of the textbook, Principles of Condensed Matter Physics.
Dr. Mutz’s primary areas of research are public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior with an emphasis on political communication. She also serves as the director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She was awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize for Hearing the Other Side, which examines interactions between people with opposing political views in the contemporary United States. She also received the 2007 Innovators Award from the American Association of Public Opinion Research.
Dr. Rabaté is a widely published literary theorist whose areas of interest include 20th century modernism, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He has written more than 20 books including The Ghosts of Modernity, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism and The Future of Theory. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Lacan and co-editor of William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society: Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage. He has also won the College of General Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching and English’s Alan Filreis Teaching Award. Before coming to Penn in 1992, Dr. Rabaté spent two decades on the faculty at the University of Bourgogne.
Dr. Rescorla’s research focuses on simple learning processes such as Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a former Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He has also received the School’s highest teaching honor, the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching. Rescorla’s previous appointments include Chair of the Department of Psychology and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected as Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The Academy counts some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners among its members. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 11, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.