The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of its new members for 2019, including two College of Arts and Sciences faculty members: Jennifer Crocker, professor in the Department of Psychology, and Lonnie Thompson, Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences. They join more than 200 individuals, including former First Lady Michelle L.R. Obama and artist Mark Bradford, with compelling achievements in academia, business, government and public affairs who have been elected to the Academy.

“We are pleased to recognize the excellence of our new members, celebrate their compelling accomplishments, and invite them to join the Academy and contribute to its work,” says David W. Oxtoby, the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Crocker is an Ohio Eminent Scholar in the social psychology program and studies self-esteem, contingencies of self-worth, and the costs of pursuing self-esteem as a goal. She joined the Ohio State faculty after serving as the Claude Steele Collegiate Professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Thompson is a Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and a research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center. His research has propelled the field of ice core paleoclimatology out of the polar regions to the highest tropical and subtropical ice fields.

This year's inductees include poet and foundation president Elizabeth Alexander (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), chemical and biological engineer Kristi S. Anseth (University of Colorado Boulder), gender theorist Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), economist Xiaohong Chen (Yale University), neurooncologist Robert B. Darnell (Rockefeller University), journalist James M. Fallows (The Atlantic), author Jonathan Franzen, cell biologist Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), business leader Charles H. Robbins (Cisco Systems), mathematician Sylvia Serfaty (New York University), philosopher Tommie Shelby (Harvard University) and actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

They also join 42 international honorary members from 23 countries including parasitologist Nadira D. Karunaweera (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka), public servant and author Kishore Mahbubani (University of Singapore), theologian and commentator Mona Siddiqui (University of Edinburgh) and historian Eusebio Leal Spengler (Office of the Historian of the City of Havana).

Crocker and Thompson will be inducted, along with the rest of this year's class, at a ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and join the Academy members who came before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966) in the twentieth, and more recently Antonin Scalia (2003), Michael Bloomberg (2007), John Lithgow (2010), Judy Woodruff (2012) and Bryan Stevenson (2014).

See the complete list of this year's new members.