Some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among those chosen this year were two IMS Fellows, Andrew Gelman (Columbia University) and Xiao-Li Meng (Harvard University). [Xiao-Li describes Andy Gelman as his “academic twin brother”!]

Andrew Gelman has published influential applied papers on public opinion and voting, the death penalty (this paper was mentioned in a US Supreme Court opinion), redistricting, environmental decision making, and many other topics. He developed the method of multilevel regression and post-stratification, which is becoming increasingly popular in surveys in social science and public health. On the methods side, his work has been directly influential within the subfields of statistical modeling, computing, and graphics, where he has advanced, through theory and example, a “falsificationist” approach to Bayesian data analysis; and also more generally throughout science, via the development, with collaborators, of statistical methods and software that are used by thousands of researchers in government, industry, and academia.

Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, is well known for his depth and breadth in research, his innovation and passion in pedagogy, his vision and effectiveness in administration, as well as for his engaging and entertaining style as a speaker and writer. Xiao-Li is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2001 COPSS Presidents’ Award, for his more than 150 publications in at least a dozen theoretical and methodological areas, as well as in areas of pedagogy and professional development. He has delivered more than 400 research presentations and public speeches on these topics, and he is the author our XL-Files. His interests range from the theoretical foundations of statistical inferences to statistical methods and computation to applications in natural, social, and medical sciences and engineering.

The 276 new AAAS members join one of America’s most prestigious honorary societies. Members contribute to Academy studies of science and technology policy, global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities, and education. The list of new Members is at https://www.amacad.org/new-members-2020.