Caltech’s Bil Clemons Elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

William M. (Bil) Clemons, Jr., the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Biochemistry, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others.

Clemons has been on the faculty at Caltech since 2005, specializing in structural biology. He earned his PhD from the University of Utah in 2000, researching under the supervision of Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Venki Ramakrishnan. There, Clemons worked to determine the atomic-level structure of a small ribosomal subunit, helping to elucidate how proteins are made and the mechanism of antibiotics. Clemons next spent four years as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School using X-ray crystallography to characterize the universal protein translocation channel.

At Caltech, Clemons and his team utilize a variety of biochemical and biophysical techniques to understand how membrane proteins are made, their evolutionary history, and the function of key proteins.

Clemons serves as a science program officer with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is known at Caltech and throughout the scientific world for his efforts to promote diversity in the sciences. He has won numerous awards, most recently the Shirley M. Malcolm Prize for Excellence in Mentoring at Caltech.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States, also serving as an independent research center. Its members work in six key areas: arts and humanities, democracy and justice, education, energy and environment, global affairs, and science and technology. Clemons joins more than 14,600 members selected over the course of more than two centuries of American life.

Also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year is Faculty Associate in Biology and Biological Engineering Edward (Ned) Ruby. Ruby has done research on beneficial bacterial-host interactions for the past 40 years, and brought his lab to the Caltech campus in 2022 as part of the Carnegie Institute for Science.

New members will be inducted into the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 21, 2024. More information about the newest members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences can be found on the Academy’s website.