Three Cornell University faculty members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They were among 159 new Fellows and 26 foreign honorary members to be elected, for their distinguished contributions to science, scholarship, public affairs and the arts.

The Cornell faculty members are: Sydney S. Shoemaker, the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy; Michael Shuler, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering; and Saul Teukolsky, professor of physics and of astronomy.

Sydney S. Shoemaker

Shoemaker, 64, received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1958 and has been a full professor of philosophy at the university since 1970. A specialist in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, he is the author of Self-Knowledge and Self- Identity (1963) and Identity, Cause and Mind -- Philosophical Essays (1984); co-editor, with Carl Ginet, of Knowledge and Mind (1983); and co-author, with Richard Swinburne, of Personal Identity (1984).

Shoemaker has received a Fulbright Scholarship to the United Kingdom, George Santayana Fellowship at Harvard University, John Locke Lectureship at Oxford University, Josiah Royce Lectureship at Brown University and National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships.

He has served on the editorial boards of The Philosophical Forum, Philosophy Research Archives and Philosophical Studies and has been a co-editor of The Philosophical Review and general editor of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. He is a former chair of Cornell's Philosophy Department and president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Michael L. Shuler

Shuler, who has a joint appointment in the Institute of Food Science and also serves as director of the Bioengineering Program, has been at Cornell since 1974.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he earned a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame (1969) and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (1973). In 1978 he won the Excellence in Engineering Teaching Award from Cornell. He became a full professor in 1984 and in 1992 was named to an endowed professorship.

Shuler is inventor of five patents held by the Cornell Research Foundation. He is author, coauthor or editor of five books, most recently, Baculovirus Expression Systems and Biopesticides (Wiley-Liss, 1995).

Among his other honors are: The American Institute of Chemical Engineering's Food, Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Division Award in 1989; and the group's Professional Progress Award for Outstanding Progress in Chemical Engineering in 1991.

Saul A. Teukolsky

Teukolsky, an astrophysicist, has been at Cornell since 1974. He earned undergraduate degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1970, and a doctorate in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1973.

Teukolsky's research interests include general relativity, relativistic astrophysics and computational physics. His earliest work led to the development of the "Teukolsky equation," which describes how a black hole interacts with surrounding objects. His subsequent research has included the physics of pulsars and supernova explosions, properties of rapidly rotating neutron stars, stellar dynamics and planets around pulsars.

One of his current projects uses the supercomputing resources of the Cornell Theory Center to study colliding black holes. He is among a group of scientists investigating the use of high-performance computing to solve Einstein's equations of general relativity. This collaboration, known as the Binary Black Hole Alliance, was formed through a Grand Challenge grant from the National Science Foundation.

The goal of the collaboration is to solve Einstein's equations by computer, and to predict the gravitational waves that would be emitted by two orbiting black holes that spiral together and coalesce. Such a wave will likely be among the first signals detectable when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory is in operation in the year 2000.

Teukolsky is the co-author of several widely used textbooks. He has held a Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his other honors is the Forefronts of Large-Scale Computation Award and first place in the IBM Supercomputing Competition in 1991.