Gladfelter and Hummer named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The newest members of the prestigious academy come from the College of Art and Sciences' departments of biology and sociology.
Faculty members Amy Gladfelter and Robert Hummer were elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences on April 19.
They join a class of 269 members in this newest class.
“With the election of these members, the academy is honoring excellence, innovation and leadership and recognizing a broad array of stellar accomplishments,” said academy president David W. Oxtoby.
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an honorary society that recognizes the outstanding achievements of individuals in academia, the arts, business, government and public affairs. The academy, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good. The organization’s work is wide-ranging and multidisciplinary, with current areas of focus that include arts and humanities, democracy and justice, education, energy and environment, global affairs, and science and technology.
Gladfelter, a professor of biology, joined the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2016. She became a faculty member in the department of cell biology at Duke University this month but remains an adjunct faculty member at UNC. Gladfelter has made significant contributions to the field of cell biology, and in 2021, was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She also received an award through the Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) Program of the National Science Foundation to support her research and was recently elected into the American Academy of Microbiology. Her lab is interested in how cells are organized in time and space, how cytoplasm is spatially patterned and how cells sense their own shape among other topics.
Hummer is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a demographer whose research centers on health and mortality disparities across population groups in the United States. Hummer is also a fellow of the Carolina Population Center and director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Add Health is the largest, most comprehensive nationally representative and longitudinal study of the health of adolescents who have now aged into adulthood ever conducted in the United States. In March 2021, Add Health received two major awards from the National Institute on Aging worth an expected $38.2 million over five years to enable the project to follow the original adolescent cohort into their 40s.
Learn more about the new class of fellows and read the announcement
