CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Chemist Peter Beak and entomologist Gene E. Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are among the 202 newly elected fellows and foreign honorary members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Election to the academy, founded in 1780, is one of the highest honors in the United States. Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks said that the "new members have made extraordinary contributions to their fields and disciplines through their commitment to the advancement of scholarly and creative work in every field and profession."
Beak, the Roger Adams Professor of Chemistry, joined the Illinois faculty in 1961. He is a leader in the fields of physical organic chemistry and organic synthesis. He is known for his research on the synthetic and mechanistic uses of stereochemistry in organic chemistry and for the characterization and understanding of organic reaction processes.
Robinson is the G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology and the director of the campus neuroscience program. Since joining the faculty in 1989, Robinson has become a leading expert on the genetic and physiological regulation of behavior at the individual and colony levels in social insects, particularly honeybees.
The Urbana-Champaign campus has had 29 faculty members elected as fellows of the academy. This year's new members will be recognized in October at the annual induction ceremony at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. The current membership of more than 4,500 includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. It was founded by John Adams, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."