Eric Cornell, a 2001 Nobel Prize winner, adjoint professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and research physicist and fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sixteen active or retired CU-Boulder faculty are now members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was founded in 1780.
Cornell was among 196 new fellows elected in 2005 by the academy, whose membership roster includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. He was the only new member from Colorado.
Cornell joins a number of high profile Americans elected to the academy this year, including Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, journalist Tom Brokaw, Academy Award-winning actor and director Sydney Poitier and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Cornell and CU-Boulder Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman of the physics department led a team of researchers that created the world's first Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995, a new form of matter created by cooling atoms to nearly absolute zero. They shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics with Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his independent research.
Both Cornell and Wieman also are fellows of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NIST. Wieman was elected to the academy in 1995.
"Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made pre-eminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large," said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. "Throughout its history, the academy has convened the leading thinkers of the day from diverse perspectives to participate in projects and studies to advance the public good."
New members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are nominated and elected each year by current academy members.
The academy, based in Cambridge, Mass., focuses on emerging problems in science, global security, social policy, the humanities, culture and education. The academy membership roster includes such luminaries as George Washington, Ben Franklin, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.
Cornell has received numerous awards in his career, including the King Faisal International Prize for Science and the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1997, the Lorentz Medal in 1998 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics in 1999. In 2000 he was elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.