Two Cornell faculty members were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 1997 and were inducted into the academy in a formal ceremony in September. They were among 151 new academy members elected last year.
The two faculty members are Isaac Kramnick, the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government, and Watt W. Webb, professor of applied and engineering physics.
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a learned society with a dual purpose: to honor achievement in science, scholarship, the arts and public affairs and to conduct a series of projects and programs that reflects the interests of its members and is responsive to the needs and problems of society and the intellectual community. Its membership totals some 3,500 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members.
Kramnick graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1959, spent a year at Cambridge University and earned a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1965. He taught at Brandeis and Yale universities and came to Cornell in 1972. A specialist in British and American political philosophy, Kramnick has edited, co-authored and written more than a dozen books on Anglo-American political ideas, including The Rage of Edmund Burke, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left and The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness. He is editor of the Penguin Classics The Federalist Papers and Tom Paine Reader.
Kramnick has served on numerous university committees, was chair of the government department from 1981 to 1985 and has been chair since 1996, won the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award in 1978, served as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1986 through 1989, and was a faculty-elected member of the Cornell Board of Trustees from 1990 to 1994.
Kramnick is a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and London's Royal Historical Society and a former president of the American Society for 18th Century Studies. He also is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The academy honored Kramnick for his contributions to the understanding of English and American ideology in the 18th century, particularly through his writings on the concepts of republicanism and liberalism.
Webb's research examines the dynamics of basic biophysical processes in living cells, using specially developed technologies including nonlinear laser scanning microscopy and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. His differential microinterferometer is capable of measuring motions of microscopic organelles at the picometer level, while his image-analysis techniques detect and track individual molecules in living cells with nanometer sensitivity.
A member of the faculty since 1961 and director of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics from 1983 to 1989, Webb directs of the National Institutes of Health -- National Science Foundation Developmental Resource for Biophysical Imaging Opto-electronics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a founding fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He won the APS Biological Physics Prize in 1990 and the Ernst Abbe Lecture Award in 1997.
Webb earned a bachelor of science degree (1947) in engineering administration and a doctor of science degree (1955) in metallurgy, both from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a research scientist and assistant director of research at Union Carbide Co. before joining the Cornell faculty.
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