Faculty members in the College of Letters and Science have recently been elected to some of the most prestigious honorary societies in the country.
- Michael Botchan, Jasper Rine and George Smoot are among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates elected on April 28 to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the nation's most prestigious societies of scholars engaged in science and engineering research. Botchan and Rine are professors of molecular and cell biology; Rine is also director of UC Berkeley's Center for Computational Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor. Smoot is a Nobel laureate, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, and a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
- Professors Francesca Rochberg and Randy Schekman are new members of the American Philosophical Society (APS), the nation's oldest learned society. They were elected on April 26. Rochberg is the Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies; Schekman is a professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Three UC Berkeley alumni were also elected: Joseph Leo Koerner, Joyce Marcus and Susan Solomon. Early members of the APS included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison and John Marshall.
- John Kuriyan, Jasper Rine, James Powell, and Yuri Slezkine were among 212 scholars, scientists, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders elected on April 28 to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers. Kuriyan, Chancellor's Professor in the departments of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry is also an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at UC Berkeley; Powell is professor of economics; Rine is a professor of molecular and cell biology, director of UC Berkeley's Center for Computational Biology and an HHMI professor; and Yuri Slezkine is a professor of history.
