Two UW-Madison faculty members from the College of Letters & Science are among a list of pre-eminent scholars and leaders newly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The L&S honorees are archaeologist J. Mark Kenoyer and economics professor Steven N. Durlauf who are joined by two additional UW-Madison Professors Juan J. de Pablo (Engineering) and Marvin P. Wickens (Biochemistry).
This group is among the 212 new class members to the academy, part of an annual tradition of honoring the leading "thinkers and doers" from academia, business, public affairs, and the arts and humanities.
They join an impressive roster of fellows that includes Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Albert Einstein.
Kenoyer, director of the UW-Madison Center for South Asia, is an expert on ancient civilizations in the Indus Valley. He is field director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project in Pakistan. He has worked in Pakistan and India for more than three decades and is current president of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.
Durlauf is the Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics. He has served as the co-director of the economics program of the Santa Fe Institute and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests span macroeconomics, econometrics and income inequality.
de Pablo is the Howard Curler Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering. His research interests include molecular modeling, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, complex fluid and polymer physics, and nanomaterials.
Wickens, the Max Perutz Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, studies messenger RNA and how they are controlled in the context of development, cell growth and memory. His is a past president of the RNA Society.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780, is an independent policy research center that focuses on interdisciplinary studies and public policy research.
The new fellows will be inducted in a ceremony October 1, at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.