Academy of Arts and Sciences
Among the 211 new members voted into the American lAcademy of Arts and Sciences are six Yale professors: Pietro De Camilli, Stanley Insler, Giuseppe E. Mazzotta, Ira Mellman, Judith Resnik and Joseph Schlessinger.
The Yale faculty members join 179 other fellows and 26 foreign honorary members elected in April to the academy "for their unique contributions to the nation and the world." The organization, which includes 3,600 fellows and 600 honorary members, honors leading intellectuals in every scholarly field and profession.
Pietro De Camilli is chair and professor of cell biology. His research focuses on the biogenesis and exo-endocytosis of synaptic vesicles, the specialized secretory organelles that store and secrete neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft. His ongoing projects are focused on the role of phosphoinositides and other lipids in coat recruitment, on the function of actin in the endocytic reaction and on the properties of a variety of accessory proteins which assist the clathrin coat in assembly, invagination and fission. A laboratory side project concerns the study of stiff-man syndrome, a human disease of the nervous system due to autoimmunity directed against synaptic proteins.
Stanley Insler '63 Ph.D., the Edward E. Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology, is recognized as one of this country's most distinguished orientalists. His main areas of interest include the history and structure of the old languages of India and Iran, Indian narrative literature, Zarathustra and the history of Zoroastrianism, and the Silk Road studies. His research currently focuses on Rigveda, Gathas of Zarathustra and the metrical texts of the Pali Buddhist canon. Insler's translation of the Gathas is widely considered to be one of the most current and definitive works on the subject.
Giuseppe Mazzotta, chair and the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Italian Languages and Literatures, is a leading critic of Italian literature. He is the author of major books on the primary figures of Italian literature. These include "Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy," "Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge," "The Worlds of Petrarch," "The World at Play in Boccaccio's 'Decameron'" and "The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico." Mazzotta is also an expert on the classics and their influence on medieval and Renaissance literatures.
Ira Mellman, professor of cell biology, received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1978. His laboratory explores fundamental questions of membrane traffic as they relate to two specific problems. The first is the question of cell polarity and asymmetry, and aims to solve the molecular mechanisms responsible for the sorting, intracellular targeting and transport of membrane components to their appropriate membrane domains in epithelial cells, neurons and lymphocytes. The second is the question of antigen processing by cells of the immune system. This work involves understanding how the endocytic and biosynthetic pathways are modified and regulated to facilitate the generation of immunogenic peptides that can be loaded onto MHC class II molecules.
Judith Resnik, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law, is a leading scholar of procedure systems, courts, federalism, federal Indian law, judges and adjudication, large-scale litigation, financing court access, and the relation of these issues to feminist theory. She has contributed to the restructuring of theories of federalism through the lens of feminism and has explored the role of feminism in the developing discipline of law and literature. Resnik served as a catalyst for a range of reform projects, including the successful Ninth Circuit study of the effects of fender on its courts.
Joseph Schlessinger, chair of pharmacology, made pivotal contributions towards understanding hormone and growth factor receptor function, the associated signal transduction mechanisms and their relevance to human disease. He established how growth factor receptors are activated and discovered how signaling proteins containing SH2 and other protein modules relay information from the cell surface to the nucleus to control cell growth and differentiation. Schlessinger serves on the advisory boards of journals such as Cell, EMBO Journal, Molecular Cell, Protein Engineering, Molecular Cell Biology and Journal of Cell Biology. (See related story.)
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 to "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people." Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the academy carries out pathbreaking studies in such areas as arms control, education, and the history and future of the humanities.
The academy's newly elected members will be formally inducted into the academy during a ceremony in Cambridge on
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