Salman Rushdie, Sabyasachi Mukherjee among several Indians inducted into American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected several Indians from around the world to be members of the august body which was established in 1780, and which “honors excellence and convenes leaders to examine new ideas and address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and advance the public good.”

The list which was announced April 28, 2022, contained Indians from U.S., U.K. and India in several fields of endeavor ranging from science to arts and humanities.

This year’s election of 261 new members includes at least 14 persons of Indian descent.

“We are celebrating a depth of achievements in a breadth of areas,” David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy is quoted saying in the press release. “These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise, and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future.”

The new members join the likes of 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), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), Stephen Hawking (1984), and Condoleezza Rice (1997) in the twentieth; and more recently Jennifer Doudna (2003), Bryan Stevenson (2014), M. Temple Grandin (2016), John Legend (2017), Viet Thanh Nguyen (2018), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020), and Sanjay Gupta (2021).

This year’s list of artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, non-profit, and private sectors elected to the Academy include the following of Indian descent:

Physics – Ramamoorthy Ramesh, University of California, Berkeley

Physics – Shamit Kachru, Stanford University

Engineering and Technology- Nilay Shah (IHM), Imperial College London

Computer Science –George Varghese, University of California, Los Angeles

Cellular and Developmental Biology- Arshad B. Desai, University of California, San Diego

Cellular and Developmental Biology- Harmit Singh Malik, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Evolution and Ecology- Maharaj K. Pandit (IHM) , University of Delhi

Medical Sciences – Abraham C. Verghese, Stanford School of Medicine

Economics – Rohini Pande, Yale University

Philosophy and Religious Studies – Jamsheed K. Choksy, Indiana University

Philosophy and Religious Studies – Archana Venkatesan, University of California, Davis

Literature – Salman Rushdie

Visual Arts – Sabyasachi Mukherjee (IHM), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay

Scientific, Cultural and Nonprofit Leadership – Maya Ajmera Society for Science