Fischhoff, Sieg Elected 2021 AAAS Fellows

Baruch Fischhoff and Wilfried Sieg, both faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, have been elected 2021 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They join Ramayya Krishnan of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and Tuomas Sandholm of the School of Computer Science as CMU faculty named AAAS fellows this year. 

“I am delighted and proud that Baruch Fischhoff and Wilfried Sieg are both receiving a well-deserved honor from AAAS,” said Richard Scheines, Bess Family Dean of the Dietrich College. “Baruch's seminal contributions to decision science and Wilfried's to logic and computation are great examples of CMU style interdisciplinary scholarship. Dietrich College is lucky to have had both of them for long and enormously productive careers.”  

The lifetime distinction recognizes important contributions to STEM disciplines, including pioneering research, leadership within a given field, teaching and mentoring, fostering collaborations, and advancing public understanding of science.

"AAAS is proud to bestow the honor of AAAS fellow to some of today's brightest minds who are integral to forging our path into the future," said Sudip Parikh, AAAS chief executive officer and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. "We celebrate these distinguished individuals for their invaluable contributions to the scientific enterprise."

Baruch Fischhoff 

Fischhoff is the Howard Heinz University Professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy, as well as the College of Engineering’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy. His research examines in the judgments of experts and laypeople related to personal and public policy decisions involving health, safety, and the environment. He has worked on topics as diverse as climate change, intelligence analysis, pandemic disease (including COVID-19), nuclear power, personal safety, trauma triage, breast cancer, pharmaceutical regulation, and sexually transmitted infections. 

Fischhoff is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, as well as former president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the Society for Risk Analysis. He has chaired committees of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a fellow of American Psychological Association (APA), Association for Psychological Science, Society of Experimental Psychologists and Society for Risk Analysis. He has received the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology, Carnegie Mellon’s Ryan Award for Meritorious Teaching, a Doctorate of Humanities honoris causa from Lund University, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. 

Wilfried Sieg

Sieg is the Patrick Suppes Professor of Logic and Philosophy and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He came to Carnegie Mellon in 1985 from Columbia University to co-found the Department of Philosophy with a distinctive interdisciplinary and scientific bent. He served as department head for 11 years, from 1994 to 2005. He was instrumental in creating the program in Pure and Applied Logic, jointly with the Mathematics and Computer Science departments. He initiated the Laboratory for Symbolic & Educational Computing that has been the hub for a number of large computational projects in the department.

The study of mathematics drew Sieg to research in mathematical logic and also in philosophy and history of modern mathematics. His mathematical work has been mainly in proof theory, a part of logic that is deeply connected with central methodological issues for mathematics. The proof theoretic research is complemented by conceptual analyses of work by pre-eminent mathematicians and logicians of the 20th century, namely, Dedekind, Hilbert, Bernays, Gödel and Turing. He co-edited Hilbert’s “Unpublished Lecture Notes on Logic and Arithmetic: 1917 to 1933” and Gödel’s “Collected Works.

Sieg has long-standing interests in technology-supported learning in logic, elementary set and computability theory. His proof theoretic work on automated proof search provides the basis for dynamic, context dependent tutoring for proof construction. That holds, in particular, for his web-based course, “Logic & Proofs,” which he created in the framework of CMU’s Open Learning Initiative.

Sieg was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala) and at the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics (Bonn). He had other extended university-based research visits, for example, in Munich (Mathematics Institute), Bologna (Department of Philosophy), Milan (Department of Computer Science) and Siena (Department of Mathematics).