Five Columbia professors have been named fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious honorary society and center for independent policy research founded in 1780, bringing “the arts and sciences into constructive interplay with the leaders of both the public and private sectors,” according to its website.

The new inductees from Columbia join 207 new fellows and 19 foreign honorary members inducted from a broad range of disciplines and professions—artists and scientists, jurists and scholars, corporate and civic leaders. The academy's new members come from universities, museums, national laboratories, private research institutes, businesses and foundations.

Patrick Bolton, the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business, specializes in contract theory and contracting issues in corporate finance and industrial organization. His research is relevant in many different related areas, including optimal debt structure, corporate governance, ownership structure, vertical integration and constitution design. He is co-author of Contract Theory, with Mathias Dewatripont, and co-editor of Credit Markets for the Poor, with Howard Rosenthal. Prior to joining Columbia, Bolton held several prominent academic titles, including John H. Scully '66 Professor of Finance and Economics at Princeton University and Cassel Professor of Money and Banking at the London School of Economics.

Dorian Goldfeld, a Columbia mathematics professor since 1985, has made a number of important contributions to the field of number theory. In 1987, he received one of the most prestigious prizes in his field, the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory, for his solution of Gauss’ class number problem for imaginary quadratic fields. He is also a co-founder of Braid Group Cryptography, a protocol that allows users to communicate securely over public channels. Goldfeld was born in Marburg, Germany and holds bachelor of science and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia.

Image credit: Alex Levac

Aron Pinczuk, a professor of applied physics and physics at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, specializes in the unique properties of semiconductors and is known as a leading experimentalist of inelastic light. Pinczuk, originally from Buenos Aires, earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 and holds numerous honors, including the Oliver E. Buckley Prize for Condensed Matter Physics bestowed on him by the American Physical Society in 1994. He was affiliated with Bell Labs from 1978 to 2008.

Ross Posnock, professor of English and comparative literature, specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literature and intellectual history in the United States, as well as the writings of Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois. He is the author of several books, including Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual and Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Prior to joining Columbia, Posnock was the Andrew Hilen Professor of American Literature at the University of Washington and a professor of English at New York University. He is currently an editor for Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994.