Stanford, CA – Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya was awarded the Zimmer Medal, and Brian Conrad was awarded a 2024 Barry Prize, by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (the Academy). The Zimmer Medal, which honors outstanding courage in the defense of intellectual freedom, was awarded to Sir Salman Rushdie last year. The Barry Prize, which is accompanied by a $50,000 cash award, recognizes intellectual excellence and independence. The awards were conferred last night by Academy President Donald W. Landry of Columbia University and Board Chair Sanjeev R. Kulkarni of Princeton University in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Four other Stanford scholars were also honored by the Academy last night. Peter Berkowitz, Sir Niall Ferguson, Caroline M. Hoxby, and Barry Stuart Strauss were invested as members of the Academy. In becoming Academy members they join prestigious fellow members including Jon Haidt, Steven Koonin, Josiah Ober, Nicholas Christakis, Akhil Reed Amar, and two Nobel-laureate scientists (chemist Arieh Warshel and biochemist Jennifer Doudna).
“Last year we were delighted to honor Sir Salman Rushdie alongside other top minds of our time, and this year we are delighted to honor Jay Bhattacharya and a wonderful group of outstanding scholars,” said Academy President Dr. Donald Landry, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Hamilton Southworth Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. “Like other academies, we honor intellectual excellence, but our Academy is distinguished by a special accent on intellectual courage. All our new members this year reflect the independence of mind we strive to honor.”
The Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom is presented annually to a public thinker who displays extraordinary courage in the exercise of intellectual freedom. The award is named in honor of the late University of Chicago President, who led the creation of the Chicago Principles, the gold standard of academic freedom that has been adopted by 110 colleges and universities. In 2023, the inaugural Zimmer Medal was awarded to Sir Salman Rushdie, in recognition of his extraordinary leadership in the struggle for human freedom.
The Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement is the Academy’s premier initiative to promote excellence in scholarship. This prestigious annual prize, open to scholars across diverse fields and disciplines, honors those whose work has made outstanding contributions to humanity's understanding and cultivation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Recipients are nominated by the members of the Academy and appointed by the board of directors; upon receipt of the prize, they also become members of the Academy.
The American Academy of Sciences and Letters promotes scholarship and honors outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences, and learned professions. To these ends, the Academy awards ten Barry Prizes each year, honoring scholars of extraordinary achievement and dedication to excellence in the arts, sciences and learned professions. The full list of 2024 Barry Prize recipients is below.
2024 Barry Prize Recipients
Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University (Law)
Gary A. Anderson, University of Notre Dame (Theology)
Marianne Bertrand, University of Chicago (Economics)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University (Medicine & Sociology)
Brian Conrad, Stanford University (Mathematics)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University (English)
Jeannie Suk Gersen, Harvard University (Law)
William Chester Jordan, Princeton University (History)
Karin I. Öberg, Harvard University (Astronomy)
Megan Sykes, Columbia University (Medicine)
About the Six Stanford Faculty Honored
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. His recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic. His broader research interests encompass the implications of population aging for future population health and medical spending in developed countries, the measurement of physician performance tied to physician payment by insurers, and the role played by biomedical innovation on health. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University.
Brian Conrad is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. He was raised in New York, and obtained his PhD at Princeton University in 1996 under the advisement of Andrew Wiles. After a few postdoctoral years at Harvard, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 2000, remaining there until 2008 when he moved to Stanford University. His research interests are at the interface of number theory and algebraic geometry, recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation. As the son of two former high school math teachers, he has also been active in educational efforts that improve readiness for college-level math, including raising public awareness about the interaction of pre-college math skills with the quantitative needs of the future workforce.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 2019-2021, he served as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department's Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the Secretary of State. He is a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995). He is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions published by the Hoover Institution, and has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications, including The American Interest, the American Political Science Review, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Forbes.com, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, the London Review of Books, National Journal, National Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Policy Review, Politico, The Public Interest, the Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal.
Sir Niall Ferguson is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. His many prizes and awards include the GetAbstract International Book Award (2009), the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013), the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize (2013), the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education (2016); and Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards. He is the author of sixteen books, including numerous prize winners and bestsellers.
Caroline M. Hoxby is Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics at Stanford University. She is also the director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She has been a presidential appointee to the National Board of Education Sciences and serves on advisory committees for the government, the Brookings Institution, and organizations with an interest in education policy. Her honors include The Smithsonian Institution's Ingenuity Award, The Thomas B. Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in Education, Global Leader of Tomorrow from the World Economic Forum, Carnegie Scholar, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a John M. Olin Fellowship, and a National Tax Association Award. She is also a renowned teacher and advisor and has received multiple honors recognizing these contributions, including the John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellowship, Stanford Economics Teacher of the Year, and a Phi Beta Kappa prize. She is one of the world's leading scholars in the economics of education. She is a principal investigator of the Expanding College Opportunities project, a randomized controlled trial that had dramatic effects on low-income, high achievers' college-going. Her best-known work on elementary and secondary education includes numerous studies of the effects of school choice and competition on student achievement, rewards for teaching, and the productivity of schools; her study of New York City's charter schools is the largest randomized evaluation of how charter schools affect achievement.
Barry Stuart Strauss is Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is also the founder and director of Cornell’s Program on Freedom and Free Societies, which investigates challenges to constitutional liberty at home and abroad, as well as the Corliss Page Dean Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Korea Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the American Academy in Rome, and is the recipient of Cornell’s Clark (now Russell) Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a classicist and a military and naval historian and consultant. As the series editor of Princeton's Turning Points in Ancient History and author of nine books on ancient history, he is a recognized authority on the subject of leadership and the lessons that can be learned from the experiences of the greatest political and military leaders of the ancient world such as Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander.
About the Academy
The American Academy of Sciences and Letters promotes scholarship and honors outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences, and learned professions. It encourages the fruitful exchange of ideas within academia and society at large by sponsoring occasions for scholarly interaction and providing platforms for the presentation and dissemination of scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. An independent 501(c)(3) non-partisan organization, it offers public programming, supports promising young scholars, and promotes traditional liberal arts ideals and standards of intellectual excellence.
Academy Board of Trustees
William B. Allen, Michigan State University, Emeritus
Brandice Canes-Wrone, Stanford University
Margaret S. Chisolm, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Carlos M. N. Eire, Yale University
Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law School, Emerita
Barry H. Honig, Columbia University
Sergiu Klainerman, Princeton University
Sanjeev R. Kulkarni (Chair), Princeton University
Donald W. Landry (President), Columbia University
Santiago Schnell, University of Notre Dame
For more on the Academy, visit https://academysciencesletters.org/ or follow at https://twitter.com/AASL_Academy.
For more information, contact media@academysciencesletters.org.
