Berkeleyan

Awards

05 October 2005

This year's AAAS fellows include five from Berkeley

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced the membership of its 225th class. Among the 196 new fellows are five from Berkeley: Giovanna Ferro-Luzzi Ames, professor emerita of biochemistry and molecular biology; Daniel Boyarin, Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture; Ronald Demos Lee, director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging; Hiroshi Nikaido, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology; and Robert Powell, Robson Professor of Political Science. Also being inducted is M.R.C. Greenwood, UC Provost and senior vice president of academic affairs.

New AAAS fellows will be officially welcomed at an induction ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 8.

Sir Peter Hall

Sir Peter Hall, professor emeritus of city and regional planning, is one of six winners of the 2005 Balzan Prize, recognized for his contributions to the study of the social and cultural history of cities since the start of the 16th century. The prize committee of the joint Swiss/Italian International Balzan Foundation announced the six Balzan Prize winners in September.

Hall, a native of Great Britain, is now a professor of planning at University College London. He has written nearly 30 books on urban and regional planning and related topics.

The Balzan Prize, worth $805,000, is one of the highest awards for science, culture, and humanitarian achievement. Two of this year's four awards went to researchers in the United States.

Official awarding of the Balzan Prize will take place at a ceremony on Nov. 11 in the Swiss Parliament in Bern, Switzerland. Prize recipients donate half the prize money to research projects for young researchers in their field of study.

Sachi Arafat

Sachi Arafat, a visiting scholar in the School of Information and Management Sciences, has been awarded a Lessells Travel Scholarship by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland, in support of a research project entitled "Creating Novel Paradigms for Information Retrieval to Rid It of Its Ad Hoc Nature."

B. Lynn Ingram

Associate Professor of Geology & Geophysics and Geography Bonnye Lynn Ingram has been elected a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in recognition of her contributions to the advancement of science. The academy was founded in 1853 to survey and study California's vast resources, as well as in response to concerns over the environmental changes during the California Gold Rush. Today it runs one of the 10 largest natural-history museums in the world and is overseen by its 300 lifetime Fellows.

Mary Wildermuth

Mary Wildermuth, assistant professor of plant and microbial biology, has received the Neish Young Investigator Award from the Phytochemistry Society of North America. Four of these awards are presented to promising young investigators each year. In addition, Wildermuth has been selected as a UC Berkeley Presidential Chair Fellow for the 2005-06 academic year.