David Latham Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

David Latham has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The Academy is one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy studies of science and technology policy, global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities, and education.

Latham is a Senior Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and lecturer in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 12, 2013, at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Members of the 2013 class include winners of the Nobel Prize; National Medal of Science; the Lasker Award; the Pulitzer and the Shaw prizes; the Fields Medal; MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships; the Kennedy Center Honors; and Grammy, Emmy, Academy, and Tony awards.

Other scientists among the newly elected Fellows include: chemical engineer Rakesh Agrawal, who developed new solar processes for energy production; Bruce A. Beutler, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Marc Tessier-Lavigne, President of Rockefeller University and a leading researcher on the formation of neural circuits during embryonic development and on nerve cell response to injury; Alan G. Marshall, who helped create the new field of petroleomics; ornithologist Sandra L. Vehrencamp, a founder of the field of behavioral ecology; David J. Wineland, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics; and Xiaowei Zhuang, a leader in single-molecule biophysics and bio-imaging.

Since its founding in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected leading "thinkers and doers" from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

More information on the Academy may be found at http://www.amacad.org.