Stuart Geman, the James Manning Professor of Applied Mathematics, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest U.S. honors for a scientist or engineer. He is one of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates elected this year in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The core of Geman’s research lies in the basic principles of representation and computation in the nervous system. “Cognitive scientists have argued for a theory based upon compositionality, which refers to the evident ability of brains to represent objects, scenes, thoughts and actions in a hierarchical structure,” he writes. “I am studying a mathematical formulation for compositionality, and the implications of this formulation for interpreting neural activity patterns and for building computer vision systems.” Geman joined the Brown faculty in 1977. He was named to the Manning chair in 1997. He earned his P.h.D in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, having completed his thesis on stochastic differential equations with smooth mixing processes. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and has been elected to the International Statistical Institute.