L. Mahadevan, Salil Vadhan elected to National Academy of Sciences

Professors L. Mahadevan and Salil Vadhan are among 120 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year, including 15 Harvard faculty members. 

Mahadevan is the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics. His research attempts to understand motion and matter at the observable and experiential scale of “middle earth,” integrating experiments, theory and computation to characterize the shape and flow of inanimate matter and the dynamics of sentient living matter that can self-organize, perceive and act. Subjects to which he has contributed include the physical basis for biological morphogenesis, the collective ethology of super organisms such as termites, bees and ants, and the mathematical physics of art forms such as origami and kirigami and musical instruments such as steel pans and musical saws. 

Born in India, he received his first degree there at IIT-Madras, before coming to the US for graduate studies, eventually receiving a PhD from Stanford in 1995. Prior to joining Harvard in 2003, he was on the faculty at MIT and then a Fellow of Trinity and the inaugural Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at Cambridge University. Since 2017, he has, along with Dr. Amala Mahadevan, also served as a Faculty Dean of Mather House at Harvard College, living and learning with a community of 450+ students. Mahadevan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow and a Simons Investigator.

Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). His research in theoretical computer science spans computational complexity, data privacy, and cryptography.

A member of Harvard’s Theory of Computation research group, Vadhan also leads Harvard’s Privacy Tools Project and co-leads the OpenDP open-source differential privacy software project. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Simons Investigator, and has been honored, among other things, with a Harvard College Professorship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The National Academy of Sciences, established in 1863, elects members in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Election to the NAS is considered one of the highest honors for scientists in the United States.