Fifteen Stanford faculty members are among the 276 new members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists and innovators engaged in advancing the public good.

From left to right starting from the top: Howard Y. Chang, Arogyaswami J. Paulraj, Michele Barry, Dan Jurafsky, Eva Silverstein, Caroline M. Hoxby, Jenny S. Martinez, Guadalupe Valdes, Anne Joseph OConnell, Kenneth F. Scheve, Thomas A. Rando, Paul V. Kiparsky, Thomas R. Clandinin, James Ferguson and Florencia Torche. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead)

The new Stanford members to join the Class of 2020 are as follows:

Michele Barry, the Drs. Ben & A. Jess Shenson Professor, is the senior associate dean for global health and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health in the Stanford School of Medicine. She is also a professor of medicine, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute and at the Freeman Spogli Institute. As the co-founder and co-director of the Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson Global Health Scholar Award, she has sent more than 1,000 physicians overseas to underserved areas to help strengthen health infrastructure in low-resource settings.

Howard Y. Chang, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Genomics and of Genetics, is a professor of dermatology and of genetics. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Changs research focuses on the role of epigenomics in the control of large groups of genes involved in cell cycle control, and on the study of long noncoding RNAs in biological development, cancer and aging.

Thomas R. Clandinin, the Shooter Family Professor, is a professor and chair of neurobiology. Clandinins research focuses on three central questions in neurobiology: how neuronal circuits assemble during development, how the functions of these circuits are maintained during adult life and how these circuits mediate the complex computations essential to animal behavior.

James Ferguson, the Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, is a professor of anthropology. His research has focused on southern Africa. His recent work has explored the surprising creation and/or expansion both in southern Africa and across the global South of social welfare programs that target the poor and are anchored in schemes that directly transfer small amounts of cash to large numbers of low-income people.

Caroline M. Hoxby, the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, is a professor of economics and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Hoxby specializes in public economics, the economics of education and labor economics.

Dan Jurafsky, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities, is a professor of linguistics and computer science. His research ranges across computational linguistics, including natural language understanding, human conversation, the relationship between human and machine processing and the application of natural language processing to the social and behavioral sciences. He also works on the linguistics of food and the linguistics of Chinese.

Paul V. Kiparsky, the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, is interested in how words are structured, how the vocabulary of a language is organized, how word meaning relates to syntax, how languages change, and what all this tells us about the human mind. His current work focuses on the interface between phonology and morphology.

Jenny S. Martinez, the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law, is dean of Stanford Law School. Martinez is an expert on international law and constitutional law, including comparative constitutional law. She is the author of The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2012). An experienced litigator, she has worked on cases involving international law and constitutional law issues.

Anne Joseph OConnell, the Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law, is a lawyer and political scientist whose research and teaching focuses on administrative law and the federal bureaucracy. OConnell has written on such topics as agency and judicial nominations, political appointees, bureaucratic organization (and reorganization), political changes in agency rulemaking, quasi-agencies and congressional oversight of agencies.

Arogyaswami J. Paulraj is a professor (research) of electrical engineering, emeritus, and is the inventor of MIMO wireless communications, a technology that enables improved wireless performance. MIMO is now incorporated into all new wireless systems. He also pioneered MIMO-OFDMA technology, which has become the core of 4G mobile systems.

Thomas A. Rando, professor of neurology and neurological sciences, is the director of the Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Stanford and of the Rehabilitation Research and Development Center of Excellence at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. His research focuses on understanding the biological signals that activate stem cells in response to injury or other environmental cues, particularly in the context of aging.

Kenneth F. Scheve is a professor of political science and a senior fellow at FSI. His research interests are in the fields of international and comparative political economy and comparative political behavior, with particular interest in the behavioral foundations of the politics of economic policymaking. He is currently examining the role of social preferences in opinion formation about tax policy, trade policy and international environmental cooperation. His work also focuses on the political origins of changes in wealth inequality in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Eva Silverstein, professor of physics, explores basic problems in several areas of theoretical physics, including mechanisms for cosmic inflation, supersymmetry breaking, the stabilization of extra dimensions in string theory and the physics of black holes. She is also a principal investigator on the Simons Foundation Origins of the Universe program.

Florencia Torche is a professor of sociology. Her research interests are in social demography, stratification and education. A longer-term area of her research examines inequality dynamics, with a particular focus on educational attainment, assortative mating and the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

Guadalupe Valdes, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is a founding partner of Understanding Language, an initiative at Stanford that focuses attention on the role of language in subject-area learning. Her research explores many of the issues of bilingualism relevant to teachers in training and the role of education in national policies on immigration.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences serves the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue and useful knowledge. The academy is committed to interdisciplinary, nonpartisan research that provides pragmatic solutions for complex challenges.

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