Two Brandeis professors elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
By Steve Foskett
April 29, 2026
Leslie Griffith, Nancy Lurie Marks Professor of Neuroscience, and Bulbul Chakraborty, Enid and Nathan Ancell Professor of Physics, emerita, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the organization recently announced.
They are among 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research and science elected to the academy in 2026.
Griffith, also director of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems, studies the biochemistry of behavior.
Her lab investigates how the nervous system integrates information and generates behavioral outputs on a biochemical, cellular and organism level using a species of fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
Griffith’s pioneering research with flies has opened up new insight into the human brain. Flies, like humans, have basic behaviors that can be altered by the animal’s internal state or by exposure to external cues. Griffith’s lab uses video and automated monitoring systems to assess locomotion, circadian rhythms, sleep and memory formation. Her work integrates these whole-animal data with information from the cellular and biochemical levels to build a multi-level understanding of how the brain uses experience to modify behavior.
"It is really a terrific honor to be invited to be part of such an august group. Today more than ever it is important to remember that basic research is the foundation of all progress, and being recognized as a contributor means a lot to me."
Chakraborty is a theoretical condensed matter physicist whose pioneering research on principles that govern fluctuations and response in non-thermal systems has opened up new insights into the plethora of systems that explore configuration space without any thermal motion. These are complex systems that occur ubiquitously in nature and industry, but whose fluctuations fall outside the paradigm of existing statistical mechanics frameworks. One of her most notable contributions is the establishment of a rigorous theory of rigidity in non-thermal solids. The crucial aspect of this emergent elasticity of non-thermal amorphous solids is that the elasticity does not emerge from broken symmetry but is a consequence of a gauge-theory pinned by a “Gauss’s law” that follows from the constraints of force and torque balance. This theory establishes a new paradigm for long-range correlations and rigidity of solids.
The letter informing Chakraborty of her election to the The Academy arrived on the opening night of the Off-Broadway play “Rheology,” in which she performs with her son, Shayok Misha Chowdhury. The play has received national attention and awards, including an Obie award, the premier honors for Off-Broadway productions.
“Today, I am being honored as a physicist, which has been my love for the last fifty years, and whose challenges still keep me awake at night,” Chakraborty said. “I will treasure this honor as a reminder of what a splendid journey this has been.”
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, chartered in 1780, was established to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic. The first members elected to the Academy include George Washington, who said – in his first annual message to Congress in 1790 – “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
