The National Academy of Sciences announced its newest members this week, among them six eminent UC Berkeley faculty members, including former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.
Membership in the academy, now held by more than 135 living Berkeley faculty members, recognizes scientists for “their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”
The National Academy of Sciences, along with the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, advise the federal government and other groups on science, engineering and health policy.
Altogether, NAS announced 120 new members and 25 new international members, bringing the total number of active members to 2,705 and the total number of active international members to 557.
The new members are:
Peter Bartlett is a Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of statistics. He is also a principal scientist at Google DeepMind. Bartlett studies the scientific and mathematical underpinnings of modern machine learning methods, with the goal of better understanding how these technologies work and extending them to new applications. At Berkeley, he is the machine learning research director at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, director of the Foundations of Data Science Institute and director of the Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning.
Joshua R. Goldstein is the Maxine J. Elliott Professor of Demography and director of the Berkeley Population Center. He is interested in combining formal mathematical models with big data to understand how populations change — how people are born, age and die — and how those processes reveal the workings of social and economic inequality. His forecasts have anticipated several of the era’s most consequential demographic turns, including the rebound of European fertility from historic lows and the surge in multi-racial identification in the U.S. census.
Gary H. Karpen is a professor of molecular and cell biology and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Using fruit flies, Karpen studies how chromatin, which packages DNA in the cell’s nucleus, self-organizes and how this self-organization affects development, health and disease. Because defective chromosome behaviors contribute to cancer, birth defects and aging, he ultimately hopes to apply this knowledge to improve diagnosis and treatment of human diseases.
Kam-Biu Luk is a professor emeritus of physics, a Professor of the Graduate School and a visiting professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Luk is best known as co-leader of the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, near Hong Kong, which discovered a third kind of neutrino oscillation. He is currently involved with the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in South Dakota through his affiliation with Berkeley Lab.
Russell E. Vance is a professor of molecular and cell biology, director of UC Berkeley’s Cancer Research Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He studies the immune system’s response to bacteria that cause tuberculosis and dysentery and applies what he learns to other areas affecting public health, such as cancer. His main interests are the fundamental mechanisms that provide host defense and how pathogens evade host immunity and cause disease.
Janet L. Yellen is the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business and professor emeritus of economics. She is the first person in American history to have led the White House Council of Economic Advisors, which she chaired under President Bill Clinton; the U.S. Federal Reserve, which she chaired between 2014 and 2018; and the Treasury Department, as secretary under President Joseph Biden. Her academic research has focused on unemployment, monetary and fiscal policy and international trade.
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