Academia

Seventeen scientists in the fields of chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering are among the 219 people elected to the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. New members were inducted during a ceremony earlier this month at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. Following are the 2012 fellows and foreign honorary members in the chemical sciences:

James M. Berger, a professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology at the University of California, Berkeley; Robert G. Griffin, a professor of chemistry and director of the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, Eberly Professor of Biotechnology and a professor of chemistry at Pennsylvania State University; Mark Johnston, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Colorado, Denver; Gerald F. Joyce, a professor of chemistry and molecular biology at Scripps Research Institute; Daniel Kahne, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology and a professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard University; David W. C. MacMillan, James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University; David W. Oxtoby, president and a professor of chemistry at Pomona College; Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Princeton University; Michele Parrinello, a professor of computational science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich; Danny F. Reinberg, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biochemistry at New York University School of Medicine; Eli Ruckenstein, State University of New York Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University at Buffalo; Helmut Schwarz, president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a professor at Germany’s Technical University of Berlin; George Stephanopoulos, Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; J. Fraser Stoddart, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University; Veronica Vaida, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry, materials science, and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jonathan S. Dordick has been appointed vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the current director of the Center for Biotechnology & Interdisciplinary Studies and Howard P. Isermann Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Rensselaer. As the vice president for research, Dordick will be responsible for advancing research across the full range of academic disciplines and interdisciplinary activities. Dordick will continue as director of the Center for Biotechnology & Interdisciplinary Studies until a successor is selected.

Paul Nealey and Juan de Pablo, who had been professors in the department of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have joined the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering. David Awschalom, currently a professor in the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will join the institute in early 2013. The institute was founded in 2011.