Honorary society selects two from Hopkins

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected two Hopkins professors as fellows last week, adding them to the ranks of the now-fifty active and retired Hopkins faculty members who hold fellowships in the 230-year-old society.
Dr. Jef D. Boeke, Professor of Molecular Biology, Genetics and Oncology in the School of Medicine, and Dr. Robert Moffitt, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, are among the 220 scholars, scientists, artists and activists who join the Academy in its Class of 2012, which includes the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, musician Sir Paul McCartney and philanthropist Melinda Gates.
In an e-mail to The News-Letter, Boeke described the honor with levity.
"I'm honored to be in the company of the likes of Mel Brooks!" he wrote, Brooks being among this year's appointed fellows.
The Academy is one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and stands at the forefront of independent policy research in the United States.
Boeke and Moffitt, meanwhile, belong to the vanguard of research efforts at Hopkins. Supplementing Boeke's role as an educator at the School of Medicine is his leadership of the High Throughput Biology (HiT) Center, a division of the university's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, where he directs a team of scientists in mapping the genetic structure of yeasts. He joined the faculty of the School of Medicine in 1986. Beyond the university, he has chaired the grant review panel regarding the study of molecular and cell biology of cancer for the American Cancer Society.
Dr. Seth Blackshaw, who has collaborated with Boeke in the HiT Center for the last eight years, described his colleague as "brilliant."
"He is a scientist who has an amazing amount of energy and an extraordinarily diverse range of interests," Blackshaw, who holds an associate professorship in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, said. "Working with him has taken me in directions that would have been impossible anywhere else. I'm delighted for him - this honor could not come to a more deserving person."
In the Department of Economics at Homewood, Moffitt is an authority on poverty in inequity in the United States. He arrived at Hopkins in 1995 to claim the Krieger-Eisenhower Professorship in Economics; in his seventeen-year tenure, he has worked closely with undergraduates and graduates alike in addition to his personal research.
Dr. James J. Heckman, a University of Chicago economist who received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in econometrics and microeconomics, told Moffit about his nomination.
Moffitt described himself as "surprised and honored" when he first learned of his appointment last Wednesday.
"I was actually notified by another professor [of economics], the one who nominated me for the fellowship two years ago. Later that afternoon, I received the official email, congratulating me," he said.
Moffitt, however, points to teaching, and not exclusively research, as the centerpiece of his time at Johns Hopkins.
"Hopkins is a lot like Brown, where I taught before coming here. Both have relatively small economics departments, which ensures direct interaction with students, both graduates and undergraduates," he said. "What makes Hopkins special is the breadth of its intellectual resources. I've found that my students are interested in public policy as well as economics, which makes for stimulating discourse."
In addition to his position in the Department of Economics, Moffitt holds an adjunct position at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Together, Boeke and Moffitt will travel to Cambridge, MA on Oct. 6 for the Academy's induction ceremony.
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