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DURHAM, N.C. -- Ralph Snyderman, M.D., was among six Duke
University scholars and researchers elected to join the 2003
class of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, an international learned society composed of the
world's leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people
and public leaders.

Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs and executive dean
of the School of Medicine, and president and chief executive
officer of the Duke University Health System, is an
immunologist whose research contributed to the understanding of
the precise mechanisms of how white blood cells respond to
chemical signals to mediate host defense or tissue damage. As
chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of
Medicine, he has helped guide a number of important initiatives
at Duke, including the establishment of the Duke Clinical
Research Institute, the Institute for Genome Sciences and
Policy, and the Duke University Health System.

The academy announced Monday its newly elected Fellows and
Foreign Honorary Members. The other five Duke scholars are
Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic professor of civil and
environmental engineering; theological ethics professor Stanley
M. Hauerwas; religion professor Ed P. Sanders; Joel L.
Fleishman, professor of law and public policy studies; and
philosopher and senior research scholar Fred Dretske.

The 2003 class of 187 Fellows and 29 Foreign Honorary
Members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize
winners and four Pulitzer Prize winners. They include Kofi
Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations; journalist
Walter Cronkite; philanthropist William H. Gates Sr., co-chair
of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Nobel
Prize-winning physicist Donald Glaser.

New Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members are nominated and
elected by current members of the academy. The academy was
founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and
others "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to
advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free,
independent, and virtuous people."

The academy will welcome this year's new Fellows and Foreign
Honorary Members at the annual induction ceremony at the
academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., in October.