May 15, 2003

Seven elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

2003 fellows are Robert Falls, Morris Fine, Sherrill Milnes, Julio Ottino, Benjamin Page, Patricia Spear and Andrew Wachtel

Seven Northwestern faculty members – Robert Falls, Morris Fine, Sherrill Milnes, Julio Ottino, Benjamin Page, Patricia Spear and Andrew Wachtel — have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious learned society.

Election to the academy, which was founded in 1780, recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to all scholarly fields and professions.

Northwestern ranked fifth in the number of fellows elected this year and now has 53 faculty members in the academy.

Robert Falls, adjunct professor of theatre, has been the artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre since 1986, after serving in that capacity at Wisdom Bridge Theatre from 1977 to 1985. His new production of Long Day’s Journey into Night opens on Broadway this month. Falls’ production of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida is currently running on Broadway, in Amsterdam, and on national tour. Falls’ production of Death of a Salesman was honored with four 1999 Tony Awards, including Best Director of a Play and Best Revival of a Play. Falls’ production of The Young Man from Atlanta was nominated for three 1997 Tony Awards, including Best Play.

Falls received a 1995 Obie Award for his direction of Eric Bogosian’s suburbia. His production of The Rose Tattoo was nominated for a 1995 Tony Award as Best Revival of a Play. Falls, the recipient of numerous Joseph Jefferson Awards during his 20year career as one of Chicago’s preeminent theatre artists, received the Illinois Arts Council 1999 Governor’s Award for outstanding achievement by an individual artist. This month, the League of Chicago Theatres will honor Falls with its annual Artistic Leadership Award.

Morris E. Fine is the Walter P. Murphy and Technological Institute Professor Emeritus of Material Sciences and Engineering.

Fine, who joined Northwestern in 1954, served as chair of the first materials science department in the United States when it was established at Northwestern. He was an associate dean at the Technological Institute (McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science) and the first chairman of the Materials Research Center.

Fine is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Materials Research Society and a fellow of the American Physical Society, ASM International, The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) and the American Ceramics Society. He has received several honors, among them the Mathewson Gold Medal of TMS and the ASM International Edward DeMille Campbell Memorial Lectureship.

He also was an honorary member of the Japan Institute of Metals and a recipient of the Charles P. Barnett Award, the TMS Educator Award, the Gilbert R. Speich Award and the TMS Institute of Metals/ Mehl Lecture and Gold Medal.

Sherrill Milnes, John Evans Professor of Music, is internationally acclaimed as one of the preeminent operatic performers of his generation. He studied under Hermanus Baer at Northwestern. In 1960 he won an audition with the Boris Goldovsky Opera Company, which launched his singing career.

He has received numerous honors including seven honorary doctoral degrees. He was named a Commendatore of the Italian Republic in 1982, received the City of New York Seal of Recognition in 1987 and was awarded the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996.

Notable roles include appearances at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the Vienna State Opera, the New York City Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. He works extensively with students in private and master class settings at prestigious schools including Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and Northwestern. He has taught at the Mozarteum in Salzburg; the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow; the Northern Royal College of Music in Manchester, England; the Israel Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv; the International Institute of Vocal Arts in Chiari, Italy; and Yale University.

Julio M. Ottino is the Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Ottino’s research in fluids and granular materials has impacted fields as diverse as geophysical sciences, microfluidics, materials processing and nonlinear dynamics. His current work focuses on granular matter and dynamics and the competition between chaos and order in complex systems.

Ottino has published more than 150 journal articles and given several hundred invited presentations and named lectureships around the world. He is author of a classic text, “The Kinematics of Mixing: Stretching, Chaos, and Transport” (1989), which has been reprinted twice. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, U.S. Army, the Petroleum Research Fund, the Dreyfus Foundation and industrial companies.

Ottino is a fellow of the American Physical Society and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has received numerous awards, among them the Alpha Chi Sigma and the William H. Walker Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Benjamin I. Page is the Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making and faculty associate at the Institute for Policy Research.

His interests include public opinion and policymaking, the mass media, empirical democratic theory, political economy, policy formation, the presidency and American foreign policy.

He is author of a number of articles, including “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy” and “What Moves Public Opinion,” both in the American Political Science Review, and of seven books, including “The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences” (with Robert Shapiro, University of Chicago Press, 1992), “Who Deliberates? Mass Media in Modern Democracy” (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and “What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality” (with James Simmons, University of Chicago Press, 2000).

He is currently studying the mass media, the role of international law in American foreign policy, and public policy and inequality in the context of globalization.

Patricia G. Spear, the Guy and Anne Youmans Professor and chair of the department of microbiology-immunology, conducts research on the mechanisms of herpes simplex virus (HSV) entry into cells and virus-induced cell fusion. She is identifying and characterizing the cell surface carbohydrates and proteins required and the role of viral envelope proteins in viral entry and cell fusion.

She also studies cell tropism and pathogenesis as determined by differential expression of multiple viral receptors in different cell types, and the variable ability of viral strains to use different receptors for entry.

Spear holds a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and she previously held a MERIT Award from the National Cancer Institute.

The author of more than 250 journal articles, review chapters and abstracts, Spear also holds two patents.

Spear is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. She received the Pasteur Award from the Illinois Society for Microbiology, a Yamagiwa-Yoshida Memorial International Cancer Study Grant, and a U.S. Public Health Service Research Career Development Award. She is president-elect of the American Society for Virology and will serve as president in 2003-04.

Andrew B. Wachtel, the Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities, is chair of the department of Slavic languages and literatures and director of the Consortium for Central and Southeast European Studies at Northwestern. In September he will become director of the Center for International and Comparative Studies.

Wachtel’s research interests are 19th and 20th century Russian prose; South Slavic literatures, particularly literature, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism; Russian drama; Russian literature and other arts; and contemporary eastern and central European literature.

His current projects include Remaining Relevant After Communism? — a multi-disciplinary project exploring how writers in eastern and central Europe have attempted to retain their importance under conditions of post-communism; a book on intertextuality and Russian theater and drama containing a theoretical discussion of the ways in which dramatists employ intertextuality as well as chapters on Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok, Benois-Stravinsky, Khlebnikov and Vvedensky; and a history of the Balkans.

Wachtel is the author or editor of seven books. He is the author of “Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia” and co-author of “Petrushka: Sources and Contexts,” and “From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Web Anthology of Russian Verse” (with Northwestern Assistant Professor Ilya Kutik).

Newly elected Fellows of the academy are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.