Four U-M professors named AAAS fellows

ANN ARBOR—The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s oldest learned society, has named four University of Michigan faculty members as fellows. They will join an elite organization that includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based academy, founded in 1780 by American scholar-patriots John Adams, James Bowdoin and John Hancock, was founded to "cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."

The U-M faculty named as fellows this year are:

Huda Akil , the Gardner C. Quarton Distinguished Professor of Neurosciences in Psychiatry. She is co-director and senior research scientist at the Mental Health Research Institute and a psychiatry professor. The Akil Laboratory focuses on two research areas: the brain biology of stress and depression, and the biology of endorphins and other molecules related to substance abuse.

Peter Railton , the John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy, chairs the Department of Philosophy. Railton’s main research has been in ethics and the philosophy of science, with special interest in questions about the nature of norms, values, objectivity and explanation. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University.

Norbert Schwarz , professor of psychology in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; research professor, Institute for Social Research (ISR); professor of marketing, Business School. His research interests include social cognition, in particular the interplay of feeling and thinking and conversational influences on judgment and reasoning. He is co-editor of "Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology," on happiness.

Yu Xie , the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of Sociology, senior research scientist at ISR and professor of statistics. He is affiliated with the Population Studies Center and the Survey Research Center of ISR. His main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods and the sociology of science.

The new fellows will be inducted at a ceremony in Cambridge in