Batavia, Ill.-Astrophysicist Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb, of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago, will join United States senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), NPR News senior analyst Daniel Schorr, novelist Chinua Achebe, and other luminaries in addressing the 2002 incoming class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Saturday, Oct. 5 at 3:30 p.m. at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“I am honored and pleased to have been chosen as a member of this group,” Kolb said of the double honor of being inducted into the Academy and being chosen to address his new colleagues. He said his speech will focus on the unification of science with the humanities.
Kolb, 51, currently lives in Warrenville, Ill., and also has a home in Chicago. The New Orleans native received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas and now serves as head of the NASA/Fermilab Theoretical Astrophysics Group. Kolb, along with fellow Fermilab scientists and Academy Fellows Leon Lederman and Michael Turner, founded the group in 1983 to explore the connections between cosmology and particle physics.
In addition to more than 200 scientific papers, Kolb is the author of the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology, “The Early Universe,” and a cosmology book for the general public, “Blind Watchers of the Sky,” winner of the 1996 Emme award from the American Astronomical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals, as well as “Astronomy” magazine.
The Academy, which was founded in 1790, inducts approximately 150 new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members each year, honoring intellectual achievement, leadership and creativity in all fields. The inductees, who are nominated and elected by current members, are divided into five classes: mathematics and physics; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities and arts; and public affairs and business. The Academy conducts non-partisan, interdisciplinary studies in areas such as international security, social policy, education and the humanities. Previous Fellows include the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.
Fermilab is a Department of Energy national laboratory, operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc.