Two University of Colorado professors have been selected for the 2013 class of members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organization honoring "thinkers and doers" across a broad range of fields.
David Nesbitt, an adjoint professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and David Wineland, an adjoint professor in CU's physics department who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics, will be inducted into the academy at a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., in October.
This brings to 25 the number of CU faculty members who have been elected to the academy.
Nesbitt and Wineland join a class of inductees that includes singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, former U.S. senator and astronaut John Glenn, plus actor and director Robert De Niro, among others.
Nesbitt, a researcher at JILA, a joint institute of CU and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, works to understand chemistry from a fundamental physics perspective. That includes, for example, how chemical bonds get made or broken. His research uses lasers to "see" chemical reactions involving highly reactive molecules, known as radicals, which are important players in a wide range of common chemical reactions, from internal combustion in car engines to ozone layer destruction in the upper atmosphere.
Wineland, who is also a group leader at NIST in Boulder, works on techniques for using lasers to cool ions to near absolute zero. His experiments have been used for precise clocks to test theories in quantum physics and may lead to the development of quantum computers.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780. Its members have included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.