April 28, 2022 | Cambridge, MA – Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and advance the public good.
For more than 240 years, the Academy has been electing and engaging exceptional individuals. This year’s election of 260 new members continues a tradition of recognizing accomplishments and leadership in academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research.
“We are celebrating a depth of achievements in a breadth of areas,” said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. “These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise, and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future.”
“The Academy was founded on the belief that the new republic should honor truly accomplished individuals and engage them in meaningful work,” said Nancy C. Andrews, Chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “The Academy’s dual mission continues to this day. Membership is an honor, and also an opportunity to shape ideas and influence policy in areas as diverse as the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.”
The artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, non-profit, and private sectors elected to the Academy this year include:
- Computer scientist Chieko Asakawa, IBM Research
- Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, Harvard Kennedy School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
- Actor Glenn Close
- Constitutional law scholar Justin Driver, Yale Law School
- Artistic director Oskar Eustis, The Public Theater
- Musician Rhiannon Giddens
- Painter Sam Gilliam
- Epidemiologist and activist Camara Phyllis Jones, Morehouse School of Medicine
- mRNA technology pioneers: Katalin Karikó, BioNTech and Drew Weissman, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
- Physicist Gabriel Kotliar, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
- Surgeon and biomedical engineer Raphael C. Lee, University of Chicago Department of Surgery and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
- Evolutionary biologist Harmit Singh Malik, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
- Clinical psychologist Terrie E. Moffitt, Duke University
- Critic Wesley Morris, The New York Times
- Sociologist Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California
- Historian Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College
- Novelist Salman Rushdie
- Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie
- Mathematician Claire Voisin, Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique
The complete list of individuals elected in 2022, including 37 International Honorary Members from 16 countries, and the areas and fields in which they were elected is online as part of the Academy's Member Directory.
The new members join a distinguished group of individuals elected to the Academy before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), Stephen Hawking (1984), and Condoleezza Rice (1997) in the twentieth; and more recently Jennifer Doudna (2003), Bryan Stevenson (2014), M. Temple Grandin (2016), John Legend (2017), Viet Thanh Nguyen (2018), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020), and Sanjay Gupta (2021).
About: The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, founded in 1780, is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines, professions, and perspectives to address significant challenges.
Media Contact: Alison Franklin at AFranklin@amacad.org