UW News

April 27, 2006

Two UW profs named fellows of prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Two UW professors have been named Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mark Groudine and David Knechtges are among 175 new Fellows and 20 new Foreign Honorary Members elected to the society this year.


Groudine is deputy director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a UW professor of radiation oncology and adjunct professor of pathology. He is also an attending physician and a member of the board for the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and a former director of the Hutchinson Center’s Basic Sciences Division.


His research focuses on gene expression and includes the development of techniques for studying gene regulation, as well as the discovery of elements that control large regions of chromosomes. He is known for his work on chromatin, the substance in the nucleus of living cells that forms chromosomes.


Groudine earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and then completed a residency in radiation oncology at the UW. He joined the Hutchinson Center and became a faculty member at the School of Medicine in 1979. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and to the Institute of Medicine in 2003.


Knechtges is a professor of Asian Languages and Literature who has been at the UW since 1972. He received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees here, and has also taught at Yale, Harvard and the University of Wisconsin.


His field is classical Chinese literature, and he is best known for his translation of the sixth century Chinese anthology Wen xuan (Selections of Refined Literature), three volumes of which have been published by Princeton University Press. He also does research on medieval Chinese literary history, Chinese court culture, and early Chinese garden history.


Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected as Fellows and Foreign 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. The current membership includes more than 170 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.


An independent policy research center, the academy undertakes studies of complex and emerging problems. Current academy research focuses on science and global security; social policy; the humanities and culture; and education.