Four faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Cornell faculty members Stephen Coate, María Cristina García, Suzanne Mettler and Fred Schneider have been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The 228 new academy members – accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, business and philanthropic leaders – also include singer and philanthropist John Legend, actress Carol Burnett and mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. They will be inducted Oct. 7 at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, former Cornell provost and chair of the academy’s board of directors. “Their talents and expertise will enrich the life of the academy and strengthen our capacity to spread knowledge and understanding in service to the nation.”

Stephen Coate, the Kiplinger Professor of Public Policy and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics, joined the Cornell faculty in 1998. A prolific scholar with research interests that include public economics, political economy and microeconomic theory, campaign finance reform, voter initiatives and the economics of broadcasting, he is the author of numerous journal articles and policy papers.

Coate was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2004 and is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received the University of Pennsylvania’s Irving B. Kravis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1992 and 1993; and also has taught at Yale University and Harvard University. Co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics from 1998 to 2003, he also has served as an associate editor at the American Economic Review (2004-10), the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2008-15) and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2010-15).

María Cristina García, the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies, is a professor in the Department of History and the Latina/o Studies Program, which she has served as director. Her Cornell honors include the Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011 and the Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award in 2016.

She is the author of three books on immigration and refugee migration, research interests reflected in many of her courses. García is president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and was elected to the Society of American Historians in March. She is the recipient of a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship supporting her current research project, “Climate Refugees: The Environmental Origins of Refugee Migrations.”

Her books include “Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994” (1996) and “Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration in Mexico, the United States, and Canada” (2006). García was a 2013-14 fellow in residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars while working on her book examining U.S. refugee and asylum policy, “The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America,” to be published in August. She is a co-editor of the upcoming anthology “A Nation of Immigrants Explained: Immigration Policy, American Society, and the World from 1924 to 1965.”

Suzanne Mettler, Ph.D. ’94, is the Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions in the Department of Government. Her research and teaching focus on American politics, public policy and political behavior, with a particular interest in inequality, democratization and civic engagement. Teaching at Cornell since 2007, her courses have included Introduction to American Government and Politics, a large lecture course. In 2016 she organized a conference at Cornell on economic inequality and American politics.

Mettler co-edited the “Oxford Handbook of American Political Development” (2016) and her current book project is “The Government-Citizen Disconnect.” She is engaged in a panel study of public opinion about the Affordable Care Act, interviewing the same group of Americans every two years from 2010 through 2018.

Her other books include “Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream” (2014), “The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy” (2011), the co-edited volume “Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality” (2007), “Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation” (2005) and “Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy” (1998). “Soldiers to Citizens” and “Dividing Citizens” received multiple awards from the American Political Science Association, which she has served in a variety of roles. She also serves on the national steering committee of the Scholars Strategy Network.

Fred B. Schneider ’75, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science, is a Cornell Engineering alumnus who joined the faculty in 1978 after completing his doctorate at Stony Brook University. His research interests in trustworthy computing and public policy focus on various aspects of systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks; and theory and algorithms for building fault-tolerant distributed systems.

Schneider is the author of “On Concurrent Programming” and co-author of “A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics.” He chaired a National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board study that produced the 1999 volume “Trust in Cyberspace.” He has done widely cited work in system security, has testified about cybersecurity research before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Science and Technology, served on the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board (2007-11), and chaired the United Kingdom’s International Review of Research in Computer Science in 2011.

He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992), the Association of Computing Machinery (1995) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2008), which gave him its 2012 Emanuel R. Piore Award; an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2011) and was named a foreign member of the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) in 2010. He was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996, and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security.

This story also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.