News Release

Two UNC professors elected 2006 fellows
of American Academy of Arts and Sciences

CHAPEL HILL - Two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professors have been elected 2006 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for preeminent contributions to their fields and to society.

New faculty fellows from UNC are Dr. Edward D. "Ted" Salmon, the James Larkin and Iona Mae Ballou distinguished professor of cell biology, and Dr. Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham distinguished professor of history, both in the College of Arts and Sciences. Salmon also is a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Salmon and Browning are among the 175 new fellows and 20 new foreign honorary members elected to the academy through a highly competitive process. They join a distinguished list of new fellows which includes former Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, actor and director Martin Scorsese, choreographer Meredith Monk and New York Stock Exchange chairman Marshall Carter, along with leading scientists, scholars, artists and civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders nationwide.

This brings the total number of UNC faculty members who have been elected to academy membership to 30. The new fellows will be inducted on Oct. 7 at a ceremony at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

"Throughout its history, the academy has convened the leading thinkers of the day from diverse perspectives to participate in projects and studies that advance the public good," said Leslie Berlowitz, the academy's chief executive officer.

Salmon, who has been at UNC since 1976, is an internationally recognized cell biologist who has had a long-standing interest in microtubules of the cell cytoskeleton and the mitotic spindle. Microtubules are protein fibers that act as scaffolding inside the cell. Salmon's particular interests include the mechanisms by which microtubules generate forces for chromosome separation during mitosis (cell division) and for cell motility.

He also studies how microtubules act to ensure accurate segregation of a cell's chromosomes to create duplicate daughter cells. Failure of this process can have such serious consequences as cancer or developmental defects.

Throughout his career, Salmon and his laboratory members have developed new video and digital imaging microscopy methods for visualizing and analyzing dynamic processes in living cells and in vitro. For many years, he has taught the undergraduate required biology course for majors, cell and developmental biology, and he has organized and taught courses on analytical and quantitative light microscopy.

Browning, who has been at UNC since 1999, specializes in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. He has published seven books in the field of Holocaust studies, including two that have been awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category: "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" (1992) and "The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942" (2004).

Browning regularly teaches a large lecture course on the history of the Holocaust. In 1996, and again in 2002-2003, he was a senior visiting scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He will be a fellow at the National Humanities Center next year.

His current research project is to write a history of the Nazi factory slave labor camps for Jewish workers in Starachowice, a small industrial town in central Poland. The primary source for this project is a collection of 244 survivor testimonies that have been given during the past 60 years, from the summer of 1945 to interviews conducted in 2004.

Founded in 1780, the academy has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.

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Photo URLs:
Salmon: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/salmon_edward_4_06.JPG
Browning: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/browning_christopher.jpg

College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu