The African Studies Center congratulates Rada Mihalcea and Derek Peterson on their election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious scholarly honors. The two were selected to join the 2026 class of 252 distinguished leaders, chosen for their lasting contributions to society.
A leading scholar in Natural Language Processing and computational linguistics, Rada Mihalcea has made significant contributions to advancing language technologies and their real-world applications. Her work spans text analysis, multilingual NLP, and AI-driven language understanding, with broad impact across both academia and industry. Her election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences recognizes her sustained contributions to the field and her role in shaping the future of human-centered artificial intelligence.
A historian of eastern Africa, Peterson has spent more than 15 years working with colleagues to salvage, organize, and digitize endangered government archives in Uganda. Supported by ASC, this work is made freely available to scholars and citizens alike. His election adds to a remarkable record of recognition: a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), Fellowship in the British Academy (2016), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2017). He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including his most recent, A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda (2025).
Induction ceremonies will be held in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read more on the record’s article here.
