LSST Deputy Director Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Steven Kahn, LSST deputy director and Camera Lead Scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He joins 220 individuals elected to the academy for 2012. The class includes some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, and artists. This year’s impressive cohort – announced on April 17 – includes Melinda Gates, Neil Simon, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"I am, of course, delighted to have been elected to the academy,” said Kahn, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at SLAC. “This is an extremely distinguished organization, and I feel very honored to have been recognized in this way.”

Kahn joined LSST and SLAC in 2003. SLAC is responsible for building the LSST camera, the largest ever constructed. The 3.2-gigapixel digital camera will be positioned in the middle of the telescope and will capture extremely high quality images of the widest, fastest, and deepest view of the night sky ever observed. Specializing in cosmology and X-ray spectroscopy of cosmic sources, Kahn also chairs the Physics Department at Stanford and holds the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professorship in the Natural Sciences.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other leaders, the Academy is an international learned society, which elects to membership “men and women of exceptional achievement, drawn from science, scholarship, business, public affairs, and the arts … to conduct a varied program of projects and studies responsive to the needs and problems of society.” Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and education.

Membership encompasses more than 4,000 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members, reflecting the full range of disciplines: mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, the social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs, and the arts. Among its Fellows are more than 200 Nobel Prize laureates and 100 Pulitzer Prize winners. Former members include such luminaries as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill.

The 2012 class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 6, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Article adapted by Robert McKercher from SLAC and AAAS press releases.