AUSTIN, TexasThree members of The University of Texas at Austin faculty have become fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joining the ranks of America’s foremost political and business leaders, poets, entertainers and scientists. Members of the academy include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. The UT Austin faculty members chosen for this honor are:
- Dr. Ben Streetman, holder of the Dula D. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering and dean of the College of Engineering
- Dr. Michael J. Ryan, Clark Hubbs Regents Professor in Zoology
- Dr. Sanford Levinson, holder of the W. St. John Garwood And W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and professor in the department of government.
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, the distinguished scholarly society recognizes international achievement in the realms of science, the arts, business and public leadership. For more than two centuries, the organization has brought together the nation’s leading figures from universities, government, business and the creative arts to exchange ideas and promote knowledge in the public interest. Early fellows include Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Daniel Webster.
There are 150 winners of the Nobel Prize and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners in the academy among the more than 3,600 Academy Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members.
This year’s newly elected fellows include King Juan Carlos I of Spain, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and photographer Richard Avedon. Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and entertainers Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward also were elected to the academy this year. Members will be inducted into the society in formal ceremonies at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Mass., in October 2001.
Streetman is a professor of electrical and computer engineering with research interests in semiconductor materials and devices. Prior to becoming dean of the College of Engineering, he served as founding director of the Microelectronics Research Center from 1984 to 1996. A distinguished alumnus of UT Austin, he joined the faculty in 1982. He is the author of a textbook on electronic devices that has been used worldwide for 30 years in five editions and four languages.
Ryan is a member of the section of integrative biology in the College of Natural Sciences and is a research associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His research interests are in animal behavior, especially the function and evolution of neural mechanisms that determine how animals choose their mates. Ryan received his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1982 and was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1982-1984. He joined the UT Austin faculty in 1984 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1998.
Levinson, an internationally eminent scholar of constitutional law, was recognized by the academy for his work in “constitutional law, theory and history in which he relates law to history, religion, music and culture in a manner that is intellectually agile and inquiringly interdisciplinary.” He is the author of Constitutional Faith andWritten in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. He is co-author of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decision-Making, and editor or co-editor of many books, including Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment and Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader. He has taught in the department of politics at Princeton University and, as a visiting professor, at Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law and Boston University School of Law. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
For more information, contact Becky Rische, College of Engineering, at (512) 471-7272; Allegra Young, School of Law, at (512) 471-7330 and Caroline Ladhani, College of Natural Sciences at (512) 471-3285 and see the Web site at www.amacad.org. For images, see: <www.utexas.edu/admin/opa/news/01newsreleases/nr_200104/academy2.html>
