PASADENA—Four members of the California Institute of Technology faculty are among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates named to the National Academy of Sciences on April 20. The election was announced during the 141st annual meeting of the Academy in Washington, D.C.
Caltech's newest members are Donald Helmberger, who is the Smits Family Professor of Geological and Planetary Sciences; Andrew Lange, who is the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics; and Stephen Mayo, a professor of biology and chemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute associate investigator. David Stevenson, who is the George Van Osdol Professor of Planetary Science and a native of New Zealand, was named as a foreign associate.
Helmberger's primary research interests are seismic wave propagation and the inversion of waveforms to recover detailed information about earthquake characteristics and Earth structure. He is particularly interested in mapping ultralow velocity zones at the core-mantle boundary and inner-core structure.
The former director of Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, Helmberger has been a member of the faculty since 1970 and previously was a research associate at MIT and an assistant professor at Princeton University. In 1997 he became the first recipient of the American Geophysical Union's Inge Lehmann Medal.
Lange is a cosmologist who has pioneered new techniques for studying the cosmic microwave background radiation, a relic of the primeval "fireball" that filled the universe at the time of the Big Bang. He has used telescopes deployed on high-altitude balloons over Antarctica to determine the fundamental geometry and composition of the universe.
A member of the Caltech faculty since 1994, Lange was previously an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He earned his bachelor's degree at Princeton, and his doctorate at Berkeley. He was co-winner of the California Scientist of the Year honor in 2003.
Mayo, a member of the Caltech faculty since 1992, has worked for the last several years on a system for designing, building, and testing proteins with novel biochemical properties. The system automatically determines a string of amino acids that will fold to most nearly duplicate the 3-D shape of a target structure.
Mayo earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University, and his doctorate in chemistry at Caltech in 1987. As a graduate student, he cofounded the company Molecular Simulations, Inc. in 1985, and served as the company's vice president for biological sciences from 1989 to 1990. Mayo also cofounded Xencor in 1997 and serves on its scientific advisory board.
Stevenson, a member of the Caltech faculty since 1980, works in the field of theoretical planetary science, employing techniques from fields such as condensed matter physics and fluid dynamics to better understanding the earth, the other planets, and their moons. Much of his research involves the interpretation of data from spacecraft such as Galileo, which orbited Jupiter, but he is also involved in work on the nature and evolution of Earth's deep interior.
Stevenson earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from Cornell University, and was a member of the UCLA faculty before joining Caltech. He is the winner of the Whipple Award and the Hess Medal from the American Geophysical Union, and was honored by the late Gene Shoemaker, his wife Caroline, and A. Harris with the naming of the asteroid 5211 Stevenson to commemorate his work in planetary science.
The new appointments bring to 70 the number of living Caltech faculty who are members of the prestigious Academy. In addition, three current members of the Caltech Board of Trustees are Academy members.
The National Academy of Sciences is dedicated to the "furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare," according to a statement released Tuesday. Established by a 1863 act of Congress that was signed by President Lincoln, the Academy acts as "an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science and technology."
NAS membership has long been considered one of the highest honors an American scientist can hold.
