Six UC San Diego Faculty Members Join Prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Amanda Datnow, Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair in the Department of Education Studies and Associate Dean of the School of Social Sciences.

Datnow’s research focuses on educational reform and policy, particularly as these related to issues of equity and the professional lives of educators. Over the past decade, she has conducted numerous studies examining the use (and misuse) of data for instructional improvement, teacher collaboration, and leadership, as well as projects aimed at transformative educational change. She is also engaged in research-practice partnerships with local districts.

The author of eight books, Datnow has also published widely in leading journals. She serves on numerous journal editorial boards, as well as on boards and committees that promote equity and excellence in public education. She is deeply committed to impacting policy and practice and works with a variety of local, national and international organizations to realize this goal.

Datnow earned her Ph.D. in education from UCLA and her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC San Diego. She led UC San Diego's Department of Education Studies from 2008 to 2013, as it transitioned from a program to a department, and began her tenure as associate dean for the School of Social Sciences in 2014. Datnow is also member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

James D. Hamilton, Distinguished Professor and Robert F. Engle Endowed Chair in Econometrics in the Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences.

Hamilton, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1983, has been a professor in the UC San Diego Economics Department since 1992, serving as department chair from 1999 -2002.

A fellow of the Econometric Society, the Journal of Econometrics, the International Association for Applied Econometrics, and the Society for Economic Measurement, Hamilton is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, as well as the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond and San Francisco. He has also been a consultant for the National Academy of Sciences, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the European Central Bank and has testified before the United States Congress.

Hamilton has published on a wide range of topics. His research in areas including econometrics, business cycles, monetary policy and energy markets has been cited in more than 75,000 different articles. His graduate textbook on time series analysis has sold 60,000 copies and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Italian. He also contributes to Econbrowser, a popular and widely cited economics blog, and serves on the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Econometer panel of experts.

Randy Hampton, Professor, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, School of Biological Sciences.

Hampton’s group studies how cells selectively detect and destroy misfolded proteins. These processes are generally known as protein quality control. Misfolded proteins underlie many of the important maladies of aging and are responsible for cell stress states in all kingdoms of life. The Hampton lab has discovered that in addition to lessening cellular stress, the high specificity of quality control degradation is leveraged in the regulation of normal metabolic processes such as cholesterol synthesis.

Hampton joined UC San Diego in 1995 after receiving his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completing a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley. An enthusiastic and engaging educator and mentor, Hampton has been honored with eight teaching awards, including the Chancellor’s Associates Teaching Award and Outstanding Teacher Awards from both Sixth College and Revelle College.

Other passions and pursuits include being an endurance running hobbyist (50 marathons completed so far), a bluegrass banjo player and a grateful member of the recovery community (42 years “clean and sober”). Hampton does not believe in the supernatural, but does believe that nature is super, and that every day is a gift to cherish and share.

M. Brian Maple, Distinguished Professor and Bernd T. Matthias Endowed Chair in the Department of Physics, School of Physical Sciences.

Maple served three terms as chair of the department, and leads a research group in experimental condensed matter physics that focuses on emergent phenomena in strongly correlated d- and f-electron quantum materials.

Maple is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alexander v. Humboldt Research Award and an Excellence in Teaching Award from UC San Diego.

Maple is a first-generation college graduate who earned a B.S. (physics) and B.A (mathematics) from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. in physics from UC San Diego. In addition to his academic appointments at UC San Diego, he has also held visiting professorships and research positions at the University of Chile, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Brookhaven National Laboratory, among many others. He served as chair of the Division of Condensed Matter Physics of the American Physical Society and chaired the famous “Woodstock of Physics” session on high-temperature superconductivity in New York City in 1987.

Carol Padden, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication in the Department of Communication.

A 2010 winner of the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, Padden has been on the UC San Diego faculty in the Department of Communication since 1983, when she earned her Ph.D. from the university’s Department of Linguistics.

Padden’s areas of research include language evolution, sign language structure and cultural life in deaf communities. She is the author or co-author of five books and numerous highly cited articles on American Sign Language as well as on new and emerging sign languages around the world. 

Padden served as associate dean and faculty equity advisor in the School of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2013. In 2014, she was tapped to be the dean in the School of Social Sciences. As dean, Padden leads a dynamic and highly ranked school spanning 11 academic departments and five interdisciplinary programs, with student enrollments totaling over 114,000 in the last year. Nearly 40% of students at UC San Diego graduate with a major from the School of Social Sciences. Among the school’s most recent initiatives are new degree programs in Computational Social Sciences, Real Estate and Development, Speech and Language Sciences, and Media Industries.

Padden’s numerous academic honors include fellowship in the Linguistic Society of America and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

Suresh Subramani, Distinguished Professor and Tata Chancellor’s Professor in Molecular Biology, Department of Molecular Biology, School of Biological Sciences.

A well-recognized figure on the UC San Diego campus since 1982, Subramani conducts groundbreaking research on intracellular compartments known as peroxisomes. His contributions to this field have included major discoveries regarding how this compartment is dynamically assembled and destroyed in response to nutritional and stress cues. These studies have provided deep insights into the role of peroxisomes in normal cells, as well as in many devastating and debilitating inherited human diseases, collectively called peroxisome biogenesis disorders.

Subramani received his PhD from UC Berkeley and conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University. At UC San Diego he has served in many leadership roles, including department chair, interim and associate dean and executive vice chancellor.

He was the founding director of the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society at UC San Diego and at inStem (Bangalore, India). A Guggenheim Scholar and fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, Subramani received the Chang-Lin Tien Award in Higher Education from the Asia Pacific Fund. He has been recognized among the most highly cited researchers in molecular biology and genetics by ISI Web of Science (Institute for Scientific Information).

This year’s induction ceremony for new members will take place in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 11, 2025.

Learn more about the Academy and view the full list of 2025 members.