For immediate release, Berkeley, CA
Jeffrey Long, a UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 2019. He joins eight fellow faculty from Berkeley in this year's class.
Long's research interests include the design and controlled synthesis of novel inorganic materials and molecules toward the fundamental understanding of new physical phenomena, with applications in gas storage, molecular separations, conductivity, catalysis, and magnetism. His lab is employing a range of physical methods for analysis and characterization of materials which include gas adsorption analysis, X-ray and neutron diffraction, various spectroscopic techniques, and SQUID magnetometry
David W. Oxtoby (Ph.D. '75, Chem), President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences said of the incoming class, “One of the reasons to honor extraordinary achievement is because the pursuit of excellence is so often accompanied by disappointment and self-doubt. 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.”
The Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good. The Academy’s dual mission remains essentially the same 239 years later with honorees from increasingly diverse fields and with the work focused on the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.
“With the election of these members, the Academy upholds the ideals of research and scholarship, creativity and imagination, intellectual exchange and civil discourse, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge in all its forms,” Oxtoby commented.
Nancy C. Andrews, Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Academy remarked, “While the work of this class includes areas never imagined in 1780 – such as cultural studies, cybersecurity, disease ecology, nanotechnology, paleoclimatology, and superconductivity – the members of the class of 2019 embody the founders’ vision of cultivating knowledge that advances, in their words, a ‘free, virtuous, and independent people."
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony in October 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and join the company of Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maria Mitchell, Charles Darwin and many more illuminaries of American society.