PASADENA, Calif.—Two 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 173 other Americans and 20 foreign honorees as the 2006 class of fellows of the prestigious institution that was cofounded in 1780 by John Adams.
This year's new Caltech inductees are Anneila Sargent, the Rosen Professor of Astronomy and director of the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), and Henry Lester, the Bren Professor of Biology. Their election brings the total number of fellows from Caltech to 83.
Sargent and Lester join an illustrious list of fellows, both past and present. Other inductees in the 2006 class include former presidents George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton; Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts; Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and Rockefeller University President Sir Paul Nurse; the chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton; actor and director Martin Scorsese; choreographer Meredith Monk; conductor Michael Tilson Thomas; and New York Stock Exchange chairman Marshall Carter. Past fellows have included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill.
Sargent, a native of Scotland, is an authority on star formation. Most recently she has been investigating the way in which stars like the sun are created and evolve to become planetary systems. She uses various radio and submillimeter telescopes to search for and study other potential planetary systems.
Her interests range from the earliest stages of star formation, when dense cores in interstellar clouds collapse to form stars, to the epochs when individual planets may be born. This field has garnered considerable interest within the scientific community, as well as from the news media and the general public, because of the possibility of locating other worlds beyond the solar system.
She is a former president of the American Astronomical Society, incoming chair of the National Research Council's board of physics and astronomy, cochair of the 1996 "Search for Origins" workshop sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a former chair of NASA's space science advisory committee, and a member of the 2000 National Research Council's survey committee on astronomy and astrophysics.
Her major honors include the 2002 University of Edinburgh Alumnus of the Year award and the 1998 NASA Public Service Medal.
Lester is a New York City native who has been a Caltech faculty member since 1973. His lab is currently involved in several avenues of research, but he is probably best known for his research on the neuroscience of nicotine addiction. A recipient of research funding from the California-based Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) and the National Institutes of Health, Lester has published numerous papers showing the underlying mechanisms of nicotine addiction.
In 2004, he and collaborators from Caltech and other institutions announced their discovery that activating the receptor known as alpha4 involved in the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine is sufficient for reward behavior, sensitization, and tolerance to repeated doses of nicotine. The discovery was important, experts said, because knowing precisely the cells and cell receptors that are involved could provide useful targets for addiction therapies.
Lester, Caltech chemist Dennis Dougherty, and a group from the University of Cambridge last year announced their success in finding the "switch" part of receptors like those for nicotine and serotonin.
His other current research interests include ion channels, synaptic transmission, light-flash physiology, and signal transduction. Within the past year he has also published papers on the creation of mouse models for epilepsy, tardive dyskinesia, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. The academy is an independent policy research center that focuses on complex and emerging problems such as scientific issues, global security, social policy, the humanities and culture, and education.
The new fellows and foreign honorary members will be formally recognized at the annual induction ceremony on October 7 at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Written by Robert Tindol