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Director Elected to National Academy of Sciences

by shauna — last modified April 28, 2010 02:35 PM

By Shauna Mecartea

Director Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Stanish in Chile.

On April 27, 2010, Cotsen Institute Director, Chip Stanish, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Stanish is now one of three UCLA professors to have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences "in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research."

Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States. Among the academy's most renowned members have been Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright and Alexander Graham Bell. There are currently more than 2,000 active academy members, of whom nearly 200 have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Stanish was elected due to his outstanding accomplishments as outlined below:

Charles S. "Chip" Stanish

A professor of anthropology and director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Stanish specializes in the evolution of complex societies in the ancient world and has done extensive fieldwork in the Lake Titicaca basin of highland Peru and Bolivia. Over the last 25 years, he has uncovered sites that span more than six millennia of human occupation in the highland and coastal Andes. He also has attracted attention for the role that the online auction site eBay has played in the illegal trafficking of antiquities.

For more information, please see the UCLA press release.

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