Technion Professor Dan Shechtman Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Professor Dan Shechtman from the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the Technion, was elected as a new member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2011, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Among the Academy’s Fellows are Nobel laureates and winners of other prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize, Wolf Prize, MacArthur Award, Guggenheim Award, Grammy, Emmy and Oscar Awards, and Fulbright Scholars.
Two other newly elected members to the 2014 class are Israeli natives – Neta Bahcall, astrophysicist and cosmologist, and Daphne Koller who co-founded with her colleague Andrew Ng the online learning platform ‘Coursera.’ A newly elected member from the public affairs domain is Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel and now US envoy in diplomatic negotiations in the region.
“It is a great privilege to honor these men and women for their extraordinary individual accomplishments,” said Don M. Randel, Chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “The knowledge and expertise of our members give the Academy a unique capacity – and responsibility – to provide practical policy solutions to the pressing challenges of the day. We look forward to engaging our new members in this work.”
The newly elected members of the 2014 class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 11, 2014, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Margaret Meade and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.