UGA Plant Biologist Stephen Hubbell Named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
Stephen Hubbell, 706/583-0393, shubbell@plantbio.uga.edu
May 6, 2003, 09:29

ATHENS, Ga. - Stephen P. Hubbell, Distinguished Research Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia, has been named a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He joins geneticists John Avise, Norman Giles and Wyatt Anderson, and anthropologist Brent Berlin as the only members from UGA.

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, 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."

The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the academy conducts studies on international security, social policy, education and the humanities.

"This came as a complete surprise to me, but it's obviously a great honor," said Hubbell. "In some ways it's very special since it honors accomplishments in both the sciences and humanities and recognizes a broad range of achievements. I'm especially grateful that the award specifically acknowledges my work with the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), dedicated to improving the scientific basis for environmental decision-making. I am very proud of NCSE's accomplishments." Hubbell is founder and chairman of the NCSE, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization with more than 10,000 members and more than 200 participating universities and professional societies.

He is also an internationally known ecologist whose research is on tropical rainforests and in theoretical ecology. He has published three books and more than 100 scientific papers in tropical plant ecology, plant-animal interactions and theoretical ecology.

He has received more than 60 grants from the National Science Foundation and from many private foundations in support of his research. He is cofounder and board member of the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS), which manages a global network of large tropical forest research plots in 14 countries in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. The ecology and conservation biology of about 10 percent of the world's entire tree flora are being studied in these plots by CTFS collaborating scientists.

Hubbell has won numerous awards for his work, and he is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment. He received the Distinguished Service Medal from the Society for Conservation Biology and has presented invited lectures all over the world.

Hubbell received his bachelor's degree in biology from Carleton College and his doctoral degree from the University of California at Berkeley. His earlier positions were at the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa and Princeton University before coming to UGA in 1999. He also has been a staff scientist, for more than two decades, for the Smithsonian Institution's Tropical Research Institute.

The 2003 AAAS class of 187 fellows and 29 foreign honorary members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners and four Pulitzer Prize winners. Among this year's newly inducted fellows and honorary members are Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations; journalist Walter Cronkite; philanthropist William H. Gates Sr., cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; novelist Michael Cunningham; recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby; artist Cindy Sherman; and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donald Glaser.
The academy has elected as fellows and honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth.

New fellows and honorary members are nominated and elected by current members of the academy. Members are divided into five distinct classes: mathematics and physics; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities and arts; and public affairs and business.
Anne Cox Chambers, chair of Atlanta Newspapers, Inc., was among others selected in the 2003 class.

The Fellowship of the Academy of Arts and Sciences now numbers 3,784, with total foreign honorary membership at 565.
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NOTE: Suzanne Morse of the AAAS contributed to this story. For further information about that organization, contact her at 617/576-5047 or e-mail smorse@amacad.org.