Three University of Michigan faculty members have earned election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation’s most distinguished honors recognizing exceptional achievement across academic and professional fields.
U-M’s Rada Mihalcea, Derek Peterson and Nicholas Valentino join a 2026 class of 252 leaders spanning academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, public policy, research and science — each selected for their lasting impact and contributions to society.
“We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence. This is a fitting commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Academy President Laurie Patton. “The founding of the nation and the academy are rooted in the inextricable links between a vibrant democracy, the free pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of the public good.”
Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering and director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research spans natural language processing, large language models/language-vision models and computational social science, with a focus on cross-cultural and cross-lingual models, fairness, interpretability and responsible AI deployment. She leads multiple interdisciplinary initiatives at the intersection of AI, health, education and social impact, and has developed widely adopted datasets and computational methods.
“I am honored to be in the company of such extraordinary individuals, and excited to engage with the academy’s members,” she said. “This recognition is shared with the many amazing students and collaborators from across the world that I have had the privilege to work with.”
Derek Peterson, a historian of eastern Africa, is the Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor of History and African Studies in LSA. With support from the U-M African Studies Center, Peterson coordinates an ongoing effort to organize and preserve endangered government archives in Uganda.
Over the course of 15 years of work, Peterson and colleagues have salvaged, organized and digitized several archives, making them available for scholars’ and citizens’ use. In 2016, Peterson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and made a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2017, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the author or editor of more than 10 books, most recently “A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda” (2025).
“The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a communion of scholars and free thinkers stretching backward in time to the very founding of the republic,” Peterson said. “At a time when so many of our fundamental rights are under threat, it is a privilege to be invited to join their distinguished company. I am hugely honored.”
Nicholas Valentino is the Donald R. Kinder Collegiate Professor of Political Science in LSA and research professor at the Institute for Social Research. He serves as a principal investigator of the American National Election Studies, which informs explanations of election outcomes by providing data that support rich hypothesis testing, maximize methodological excellence, measure many variables, and promote comparisons across people, contexts and time. Valentino is known for his work in political psychological approaches to understanding public opinion formation, socialization, information seeking, and electoral participation.
“My research process is foundationally collaborative, so an achievement like this would never have been possible without the work of mentors, co-authors, colleagues, our great university, and, most importantly, my students,” he said. “There is no way for me to convey the significance of the many contributions they have made to our joint scholarship. I am confident they know who they are, and I am immensely grateful. I am excited to receive this honor on behalf of all of us.”
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, chartered in 1780, was established to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic.
Induction ceremonies for new members will take place in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
