NYU Professor Myles Jackson elected to German National Academy of Sciences

Myles Jackson, a professor at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Polytechnic Institute of NYU, has been elected as a foreign member of the German National Academy of Sciences, the nation's equivalent of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Established in 1652 and also known as the Leopoldina zu Halle, it is one of the oldest academies of sciences in the world and the oldest continuously existing academy. Its members have included Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe, Charles Darwin, and more than 100 Nobel Laureates, among them Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein.

Jackson's works include Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Markers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press) and Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics (MIT Press). He is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled: Patents, Race, and HIV/AIDS: A History of the CCR5 Gene Patent. Jackson is also a member of the Erfurt Academy of Sciences in Germany.

The Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at NYU-Poly, Jackson spent much of the summer of 2011 in Germany under a Humboldt Fellowship examining the application of mathematical and engineering models to skilled labor practices. He also studied how Germany offers programs to re-educate those workers whose positions have been replaced by technological advances. During this time, he delivered keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the German Society for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Stuttgart and to the Thuringia Academy of Sciences in Erfurt.

Provided by New York University