Keen elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Psychology professor Rachel Keen is among 175 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an international learned society whose members are drawn from science, scholarship, business, public affairs and the arts.

Keen and the other new fellows, who include former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Chief Justice John Roberts; Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Paul Nurse; director Martin Scorsese; choreographer Meredith Monk; and Rita Dove, former U.S. poet laureate, will be formally inducted in an October 7 ceremony at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge.

A recognized leader in the study of child development, Keen has been a member of the faculty since 1968. She has developed four lines of research, beginning with cardiac orienting and conditioning in human infants. In the early 1980s, Keen began focusing on auditory localization and pitch perception in neonates and infants, developing an innovative strategy to study sound perception using a reaching-in-the-dark paradigm. Since then, she has extended this paradigm to study memory, object permanence, and cognitive processing in infants and toddlers.

“This is a great honor for Rachel who is being recognized for her many outstanding achievements in the field of developmental psychology,” said Melinda Novak, who chairs the Psychology Department.

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields to the Academy,” said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. “Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.”

Keen is the author of nearly 100 articles and has been published in journals such as Developmental Psychology, Child Development, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. She served for six years as editor of the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Her work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1969, and she has mentored several scientists who have gone on to tenure-track positions at leading research institutions.

Last year, Keen received a renewal of her MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health for her research. Only about 10 to 15 percent of submitted grants get funded and to receive a MERIT award, a researcher must have a strong record of continuous support and be in the upper 1 to 2 percent of the funded grants. Keen’s MERIT award began in 1999.

Also in 2005, Keen was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and was one of 12 Amherst campus faculty members to receive the Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. In 1988, she was a Distinguished Faculty Lecturer.

Keen is the seventh faculty member to join the academy. Other fellows include John J. McCarthy, Linguistics and Lynn Margulis, Geosciences; and emeriti professors Barbara Partee, Linguistics; Alice Rossi and Peter Rossi, Sociology; and Richard Stein, Chemistry.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the academy has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 170 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. An independent policy research center, the academy undertakes studies of complex and emerging problems. Current academy research focuses on science and global security, social policy, humanities and culture and education.

More Information

American Academy of Arts and Sciences press release

April 26, 2006.