The new members, who have made key contributions across a range of fields, join previously elected fellows in helping to advance the common good.
Eight Yale scholars elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Top row, from left: Ned Blackhawk, Gary Brudvig, Jennifer Gandhi, and Valentina Greco. Second row: Marina Halac, Oona Hathaway, Caryl Phillips, and Philipp Strack.
Eight Yale faculty members are among the nearly 250 leaders elected as new members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the academy announced this week.
The academy — an honorary society and independent policy organization with initiatives in the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science — elects new members each year in recognition of their notable achievements in academia, industry, policy, research, and science. This year’s class also includes international honorary members from 16 countries.
New members who currently serve on the Yale faculty include Ned Blackhawk (history), Gary Brudvig (chemistry), Jennifer Gandhi (political science), Valentina Greco (cellular and developmental biology), Marina Halac (economics), Oona A. Hathaway (law), Caryl Phillips (literature), and Philipp Strack (economics).
“These new members’ accomplishments speak volumes about the human capacity for discovery, creativity, leadership, and persistence,” said Laurie L. Patton, president of the academy. “They are a stellar testament to the power of knowledge to broaden our horizons and deepen our understanding. We invite every new member to celebrate their achievement and join the Academy in our work to promote the common good.”
The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and other early leaders of the United States with the purpose of honoring exceptionally accomplished individuals and engaging them in the betterment of society. The first members elected in 1781 included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
The new members from Yale are:
Ned Blackhawk, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and of ethnicity, race, and migration, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), is an expert on the history of Indigenous people in North America whose work bridges the fields of U.S. western history, early American history, and Native American studies. In 2023, he won the National Book Award for “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” which documents the central role of Native Americans in the political and cultural life of the country. A member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada, he serves as the faculty coordinator of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America and the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, and on the advisory board of Yale’s Native American Cultural Center.
Gary Brudvig, the Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry in FAS and professor of materials science at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, explores the question of how nature has solved the challenge of efficient light-driven, four-electron oxidation of water to O2 and to use this understanding to develop new artificial processes for solar energy conversion. He leads a team of scientists who are hoping to improve the efficiency of solar-energy utilization. Its aim is to attach manganese complexes to titanium dioxide nanoparticles in order to develop a system that will efficiently produce renewable fuel using solar energy. He is also director of the Energy Sciences Institute on Yale’s West Campus.
Jennifer Gandhi, the Howard Wang ’95 Professor of Global Affairs and Political Science, at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and in the Department of Political Science in FAS, studies authoritarian regimes and transitions to democracy. In her research, Gandhi examines how autocracies use institutions, such as legislatures, parties, and elections, to consolidate their power. She also investigates the conditions under which opposition parties may coordinate to challenge autocratic incumbents in elections. She has authored award-winning books and numerous chapters and journal articles, including “Political Institutions under Dictatorship,” which examined the role of nominally democratic institutions in autocracies and was a major contribution to the field.
Valentina Greco, the Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine, studies how tissues maintain themselves throughout the course of our lives in the face of continuous cellular turnover, frequent injuries, and spontaneous mutations. To do so, her lab has developed novel tools that integrate imaging of stem cells in their niche in live mice with both genetic and cell biological approaches that empower a better understanding of the complex orchestration of tissue regeneration using the skin as a model system. She is also a professor of cell biology and dermatology, and a member of the Yale Stem Cell Center and Yale Cancer Center.
Marina Halac, the Stanley Resor (B.A. 1901) Professor of Economics in FAS, is an expert in game theory, contract theory, and mechanism design. Halac’s research focuses on understanding how incentives are shaped by contracting constraints and the information environment. She has developed dynamic contracts models to study issues such as the structure and breakdown of employment relationships, the problem of how to motivate experimentation and innovation, and the role of reputation in maintaining productivity. She has extensive work on delegation, with an emphasis on how to design fiscal and monetary policy rules in the presence of political biases.
Oona A. Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and professor of political science in FAS, researches the foundations of modern international law, the intersection of U.S. constitutional law and international law, the enforcement of international law, and the law of armed conflict. A member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Advisor at the U.S. Department of State since 2005, she took a leave in 2014-15 to serve as special counsel to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense. At Yale Law she is the director of the annual Yale Cyber Leadership Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also has appointments at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.
Caryl Phillips, a professor of English in FAS, is an acclaimed writer has authored 12 novels, four works of non-fiction, two anthologies, and has written dramas and documentaries fore radio and television. His novel “Crossing the River” was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. “A Distant Shore” was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; “Dancing in the Dark” won the 2006 PEN/Open Book Award. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for “Crossing the River”). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts.
Philipp Strack, the Cowles Foundation Professor of Economics in FAS, is a scholar of microeconomic theory who has achieved key advances in the field of game theory and behavioral economics. In his work, he has examined the limits of behavioral theories, showing the care needed to interpret and measure empirical facts. His accomplishments include contributions to studies of mechanism design and decision-making, particularly in settings that involve learning and information transmission; the formalization of ideas, such as information cost functions or notions of privacy, so that these concepts can be more fruitfully applied; and the development of a new analytical approach to mechanism design.
Other newly elected members include José Andrés, founder and chief feeding officer of the nonprofit World Central Kitchen; activist and journalist Gloria Steinem; CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper ’89; filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Ava DuVernay (who received an honorary degree from Yale in 2021); the novelist Amy Tan; and Mary Kathryn Nagle, a playwright and attorney who works to protect tribal sovereignty (and a former executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program).
The new members will be inducted during a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October.