Six Faculty: Election to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Six faculty and researchers affiliated with theUniversity of Pennsylvania have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They are Yale Goldman, Katalin Karik, and Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine; Nicholas Sambanis of theSchool of Arts and Sciences; Diana Slaughter Kotzin of the Graduate School of Education; and Dorothy E. Roberts, joint appointments in the Penn Carey Law School and School of Arts and Sciences.

They are among more than 260 new members honored in 2022, recognized for their accomplishments and leadership in academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research.

Yale Goldman is a professor of physiology at the Perelman School of Medicine, with a secondary appointment in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. A Philadelphia native, he has been a fixture at Penn for decades, arriving on campus in the early 1970s as a doctoral student and joining the faculty in 1980. From 1988 until 2010, he served as director of the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute at Penn.

Dr. Goldmans research focuses on better understanding the structural changes that the bodys biological machines undergo. He and his lab have developed novel biophysical techniques to observe this, ranging from nanometer tracking of fluorescent molecules to infrared optical traps, known as laser tweezers. The goal is to make discoveries that, in the long term, lead to better outcomes for those with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, and cardiac myopathies.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Goldman has also served as president of the Biophysical Society and as an editorial board member of the Journal of Physiology and the Biophysical Journal.

Katalin Karik is a senior vice president at BioNTech and an adjunct professor of neurosurgery in the Perelman School of Medicine. She joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and began collaborating with fellow inductee Drew Weissman in 1997. Together, they invented the modified mRNA technology used in Pfizer-BioNTech and Modernas vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infection.

For decades, Dr. Kariks research as a biochemist has focused on RNA-mediated mechanisms, with the goal of developing in vitrotranscribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered with Dr. Weissman that nucleoside modifications suppress the immunogenicity of RNA. This led to the development of the two most effective vaccines for COVID-19.

Dr. Karik has been honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the Princess of Asturias Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Biotechnology. She continues to work on new therapeutic applications of mRNA therapy.

Diana Slaughter Kotzin, professor emerita in the Graduate School of Education, was the inaugural Constance E. Clayton Professor in Urban Education from 1998 to 2011. She earned her bachelors and masters degrees in human development and a PhD in human development and clinical psychology from the University of Chicago.

Her research interests include culture, primary education, and home-school relations facilitating in-school academic achievement.

Before joining Penn, she taught at Northwestern Universitys School of Education and Social Policyfor 20 years. Previously she was on the faculties of Howard University, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. Among her many awards and accolades, in 2019, the American Psychological Association designated her a pioneer woman of color among the first to break into psychologys ranks.

Dorothy E. Roberts is the George A. Weiss Professor of Law & Sociology, the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and a professor of Africana studies. She is also the founding director of the Program on Race, Science, and Society (PRSS). With appointments in the Carey Law School and the School of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Roberts works at the intersection of law, social justice, science, and health, focusing on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics.

Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). Her newest book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Familiesand How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books), was published in April. Dr. Roberts is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Nicholas Sambanis is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science and director of the Penn Identity & Conflict Lab (PIC Lab). He writes on conflict processes with a focus on civil wars and other forms of intergroup conflict.

The lab works on a broad range of topics related to intergroup conflicts in the world, including the effects of external intervention on peace-building after ethnic war, the analysis of violent escalation of separatist movements, conflict between native and immigrant populations, and strategies to mitigate bias and discrimination against minority groups. His focus is the connection between identity politics and conflict processes, drawing on social psychology, behavioral economics, and the comparative politics and international relations literature in political science.

Drew Weissman is the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research in the Perelman School of Medicine and an internationally recognized scientist whose foundational research with scientific collaborator Katalin Karik led to mRNA vaccines and a highly effective method of curbing the spread of COVID-19.

For decades, Dr. Weissman has studied immunology and the ways mRNA might trigger protective immune responses, first focusing on HIV at the National Institutes of Health and then at Penn, where he turned his attention to developing mRNA vaccines for other diseases and conditions. One goal is to create a pan-coronavirus vaccine, which could prevent all types of coronaviruses, including COVID-19. He has also worked with researchers globally to help them develop mRNA COVID vaccines and to increase access to such vaccines in remote and under-resourced areas.

Dr. Weissman has received many awards, including the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

More here:

Six Faculty: Election to American Academy of Arts and Sciences - U Penn