Simons Grantees Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2017 Class

Among 228 newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, five are researchers supported by the Simons Foundation. They are:

• Manjul Bhargava, a mathematician based at Princeton University. He won a Fields Medal in 2014 “for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers,” according to his award citation.

• Charles S. Craik, a chemist at the University of California, San Francisco and SFARI investigator. He has made pioneering contributions to understanding the structure and function of proteases and their inhibitors.

• Christopher D. Hacon, a mathematician at the University of Utah whose works are among the most important contributions to higher-dimensional algebraic geometry.

• Maryam Mirzakhani, a mathematician at Stanford University. She became the first woman to win a Fields medal, for “her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces,” according to her 2014 award citation.

• William T. Newsome, a neuroscientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. A member of the executive committee of the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain, he has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and decision making.

The academy is among the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. It aims to advance science, engineering and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.

The full list of the 2017 academy members is here.

[UPDATED April 18, 2017: New SFARI investigator Charles S. Craik was added to this list.]