The National Academy of Sciences recently announced the election of 120 members and 30 international members, including two from the University of Michigan– Phoebe Ellsworth and Scott Page— in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Ellsworth, a professor of both psychology and law at the University of Michigan and an affiliate of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, is a ground-breaking scholar who has made central research contributions in two distinct areas within psychology: the theory of emotions and the field of psychology and law.

She is the author of over 100 articles and books, including her 1985 classic with Craig Smith, “Patterns of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotions,” which placed a social psychological theory of emotions on strong empirical footing, and her book Emotion in the Human Face (co-authored with Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen), first published in 1972 and cited many thousands of times. Professor Ellsworth’s fundamental contributions to psychology and law include her landmark research on how death penalty attitudes influence the quality of jury deliberation and the jury’s verdict.

Ellsworth received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College in 1966 and her Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1970. She joined the University of Michigan faculty as a professor in 1987. Professor Ellsworth was named the Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law in 1994, the Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology in 1997, and the Frank Murphy Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Law in 2003. She retired from active faculty status on December 31, 2018.

Her previous honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992), as well as distinguished career and lifetime achievement awards from Phi Beta Kappa (2002), the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2014), the Association for Psychological Science (2015), the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2017), Cornell University (2018) and the American Psychological Association (1999). Professor Ellsworth’s mentoring has been honored with national awards from the American Psychological Association (2011), the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2014), and the Association for Psychological Science (2017)

Scott Page is the John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management, Department of Complex Systems; and the Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration, Ross School of Business. His​ research focuses on the function of diversity in complex social systems, the potential for collective intelligence, and the design of institutions for meeting the challenges of a complex world.

Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,662 and the total number of international members to 556.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.