The American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS), one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed learned societies, has elected five distinguished scholars and practitioners as 2016 Fellows. The AAPSS inducts several Fellows each year, in recognition of their contributions to the improvement of society through research and public service.
Since the founding of its Fellows program in 2000, AAPSS has inducted 106 Fellows, most of them university-based scholars responsible for research that has changed our understanding of human behavior and the world in which we live. Several AAPSS Fellows have also been public servants, working in institutions of government to improve the common good, and this year’s cohort adds another Nobel Prize winner to the list of dignitaries.
The five 2016 Fellows of the Academy are:
Esther Duflo is an economist whose research has improved our understanding of poverty and our ability to design and evaluate social policies that help to alleviate economic hardship. She is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
James J. Heckman is an economist whose work on human development won him the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2000. He has conducted groundbreaking work that illustrates how the quality of early childhood development greatly affects health, economic, and social outcomes for individuals and society at large. He is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.
Sherman A. James is a social psychologist and epidemiologist whose work has led to critical new understandings of public health. He is most well known for his theoretical and empirical work on the role of chronic stress in the development of cardiovascular disease. He is the Susan B. King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and a research professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University.
Thomas J. Sugrue is a social historian whose work has been indispensable in the study of race relations and civil rights in America. He is an acclaimed author and editor, whose work on the equanimity of American society has informed scholarship and public policy in the United States and abroad. For twenty-four years, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. He is now a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University.
Philip Tetlock is a psychologist and the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Wharton School and the departments of psychology and political science. His research has dismantled and reconfigured conventional wisdom about “good judgment” and has provided path-breaking insights on bias, error and, most recently, forecasting.
“Each year we welcome a special class of Fellows to the Academy, and this year is no different,” said Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University and President of the AAPSS. “Each of these distinguished individuals has taught us that the results of powerful and compelling research can serve the common good by contributing to the quality of public policy making. We are honored to welcome them to the Academy.”
Duflo, Heckman, James, Sugrue, and Tetlock will officially join the Academy on the evening of May 12, 2016, in a ceremony in Washington, DC.
For a complete list of AAPSS Fellows, visit Fellows of the Academy.
