Two CU-Boulder Faculty Members Elected To Prestigious American Academy Of Arts And Sciences

Two University of Colorado at Boulder faculty members have been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the only Coloradans to receive the honor this year.

Elected to the nation's oldest learned society were Charles DePuy, professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry, and Robert F. Nagel, the Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. professor of constitutional law. They are among only 16 CU-Boulder faculty members to have been elected members of the academy.

The 2003 class of 187 newly elected Fellows and 29 Foreign Honorary Members includes three Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners and four college presidents. Among this year's honorees are Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations; journalist Walter Cronkite; philanthropist William H. Gates, Sr., co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; novelist Michael Cunningham; and recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby.

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams and other early leaders of the United States. The academy will welcome this year's new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members in October at the annual induction ceremony at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

DePuy has made outstanding contributions to the field of physical organic chemistry, a relatively new field developed in the years following World War II. He also is well known for his work on gas phase ion chemistry.

DePuy, who retired from teaching about 10 years ago, had been a professor at CU-Boulder since 1963. Before coming to Boulder, he spent a decade as a professor at Iowa State University.

Nagel, a nationally recognized constitutional law specialist, is a former director of the law school's Byron White Center for the Study of Constitutional Law. He was a deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania before coming to CU-Boulder in 1975.

Nagel has published several books and close to 50 academic articles. He also has provided commentary on constitutional issues in dozens of newspapers and magazines, on national radio interviews and before Congressional committees.

The current academy membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the American Academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, social policy, education and the humanities.

Previous members of the academy include George Washington, Ben Franklin, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Niels Bohr, Jawaharlal Nehru and Albert Camus.

"It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals to the nation's oldest and most illustrious learned society," said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. "Election to the American Academy is an honor that acknowledges the best of all scholarly fields and professions. Newly elected Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines."

A full list of new members is available on the Academy of Arts and Sciences Web site at http://www.amacad.org/news/new2003.htm.