PASADENA, Calif.—Three faculty members at the California Institute of Technology are among this year's newly elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They join 224 other honorees as the 2007 class of fellows of the prestigious institution that was cofounded in 1780 by John Adams.
This year's new Caltech inductees are John Henry Schwarz, the Harold Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics; Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems; and Michael Ortiz, the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering. Their election brings the total number of fellows at Caltech to 86.
Koch's research involves working with new scientific tools that look inside functioning animal and human brains, raising the tantalizing possibility that we are getting closer to understanding the relationship between the conscious mind and the brain—the age-old mind-body problem. Koch's approach, which was also taken by the late Francis Crick (codiscoverer of the DNA helix), focuses on finding and characterizing the neuronal correlates of consciousness in mice, monkeys, and humans. He is the author, most recently, of The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach.
Koch most recently became founding director of the Broad Fellows Program in Brain Circuitry at Caltech, which was made possible last year by an $8.9 million grant from the Broad Foundation and philanthropist Eli Broad. The program sponsors research that seeks to uncover new insights into how the brain's neurons work together, how they encode information, and how they generate thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Ortiz leads the Solid Dynamics group at Caltech's Center for Simulation of the Dynamic Response of Materials. The center is a virtual shock-physics facility in which the full three-dimensional response of a variety of target materials can be computed for a wide range of compressive, tensional, and shear loadings.
Ortiz has been a Fulbright Scholar; a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech; a fellow and an elected member-at large of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics; a Midwest and Southwest Mechanics Seminar Series Distinguished Speaker; and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award winner. Since 2002 he has been a member of the University of California Office of the President Science and Technology Panel.
Schwarz for the last four decades has been one of the driving forces behind string theory, an ambitious attempt to create an all-encompassing framework to explain the universe and everything in it. String theory assumes that everything is built of tiny stringlike bits of matter. He is also codeveloper of superstring theory, which posits 10 dimensions and combines quantum mechanics and gravity in a mathematically elegant way.
Schwarz has worked on superstring theory for most of his professional career. In 1986 he became a fellow of the American Physical Society, and the following year received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997, and in 2002 won the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, which is awarded by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics.
Schwarz, Koch, and Ortiz join former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, New York Mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg, Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, and many others as a 2007 inductee. Fellows and foreign honorary members are nominated and elected to the Academy by current members.
The academy will welcome this year's new class at its annual induction ceremony on October 6, at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the academy has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation. An independent policy research center, the academy undertakes studies of complex and emerging problems. Current academy research focuses on science and global security; social policy; the humanities and culture; and education.
