Four medical school professors elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Four professors at the School of Medicine are among the 276 scientists, scholars, artists and leaders elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. 

The academy, one of the country’s most prestigious honorary societies, is a center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy-led studies in a variety of fields, including science policy, global security, social policy and education. 

Fifteen Stanford faculty members were elected this year. The four from the School of Medicine are as follows:

Michele Barry, MD, the Drs. Ben & A. Jess Shenson Professor, is the senior associate dean for global health and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health in the Stanford School of Medicine. She is also a professor of medicine, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute and at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). As the co-founder and co-director of the Yale/Stanford Johnson and Johnson Global Health Scholar Award, she has sent over 1,000 physicians overseas to underserved areas to help strengthen health infrastructure in low-resource settings. 

Howard Chang, MD, PhD, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Genomics and of Genetics, is a professor of dermatology and of genetics. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Chang’s research focuses on the role of epigenomics in the control of large groups of genes involved in cell cycle control, and on the study of long noncoding RNAs in biological development, cancer and aging. He is a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, the Stanford Cancer Institute and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford. 

Thomas Clandinin, PhD, the Shooter Family Professor, is a professor and chair of neurobiology. Clandinin’s research focuses on three central questions in neurobiology, including how neuronal circuits assemble during development, how the functions of these circuits are maintained during adult life and how these circuits mediate the complex computations essential to animal behavior. He is a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, the Stanford Cancer Institute and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford.

Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences, is the director of the Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Stanford and of the Rehabilitation Research and Development Center of Excellence at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. His research focuses on understanding the biological signals that activate stem cells in response to injury or other environmental cues, particularly in the context of aging. He is also the deputy director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and is a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford.