Institute For Advanced Study Appoints Two New Trustees

The Institute for Advanced Study has announced the appointment of two new members to its Board of Trustees, Andrew Strominger and Shelby White.

Strominger is professor of physics at Harvard University. A former long-term member of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute (1982-87), he was professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1986 to 1997, the year in which he joined the Harvard faculty.

A theoretical physicist, Strominger’s research concerns quantum gravity, string theory, and quantum field theory.

Strominger earned his B.A. at Harvard, his M.A. at the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A former Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, he is a senior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

He has served on advisory boards of the Aspen Center for Physics; the National Science Foundation Institute for Theoretical Physics; the Seventh International Symposium on Particles, Strings, and Cosmology; and the 2001 Strings Conference.

A former principal investigator for the National Science Foundation Institute for Theoretical Physics, Strominger was director of the National Advanced Study Summer Institute in Akureyri, Iceland, in 2000. Currently he is an organizer of the Benasque Center for Science at the University of Barcelona, and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Morningside Center for Mathematics in Peking.

Shelby White is an author, collector, and philanthropist. Her financial articles have appeared in publications that include the New York Times, Town and Country, Redbook, and Forbes. Author of What Every Woman Should Know About Her Husband’s Money (1992, 1994), White is a director of Alliance Capital Money Market Funds and Atlas Capital Group. She has also written on philanthropy and collecting art.

White chairs the White-Levy Program for Archaeological Publications. With her late husband Leon Levy, she sponsored the excavations at Ashkelon, Israel, as well as archeological investigations of ancient Phoenician shipwrecks. White and Levy established the New Initiatives Program at the Institute for Advanced Study, which enabled the Institute to explore new and interdisciplinary areas of knowledge; it made possible the recent establishment of the Institute’s Program in Theoretical Biology, now the Center for Systems Biology. White and Levy also established the Leon Levy Biogenetics Center at Rockefeller University.

She serves on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Botanical Garden, among other institutions; is on the Visiting Committee of the Freer and Sackler galleries; and has taught courses on philanthropy at New York University and museum studies at City College.

White received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. from Columbia University.

Also on the Board of Trustees, Charles Simonyi, President and CEO of Intentional Software Corporation in Bellevue, Wash., has been named President of the Corporation, succeeding the late Leon Levy in this office. Ladislaus von Hoffmann, president of Omicron Investments, Inc., in Washington, D.C., on the board since 1988, has been named Trustee Emeritus; and Martin Rees, who is Royal Society Research Professor and a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge, has stepped down from the board, of which he had been a member since 1998.