Carol Ember’s Advance of Cross-Cultural Research Earns Her Honor as AAAS Fellow

Carol R. Ember, executive director of the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS awarded the distinction to 486 of its members this year. Ember was chosen for “distinguished contributions to anthropology through furthering cross-cultural research as a comparative ethnographer and as executive director of the Human Relations Area Files,” according to an announcement by the association.

The HRAF is an internationally recognized organization in the field of cultural anthropology that was founded in 1949 at Yale. A not-for-profit membership consortium of universities, colleges and research institutions, its mission is to provide information that facilitates the cross-cultural study of human behavior, society and culture.

Ember has devoted much of her career to cross-cultural research on variation in marriage, family, kin groups, gender roles, and predictors of war and other forms of violence. She is interested in research that integrates the fields of anthropology with other disciplines. She is the first author (with Melvin Ember) of “Cultural Anthropology,” now in its 12th edition, and “Anthropology” (with Melvin Ember and Peter N. Peregrine), also in its 12th edition. She and Melvin Ember have also written a textbook on how to do cross-cultural research. Prior to her current post at Yale, she was a professor of anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Ember and the other new AAAS fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a rosette pin at a ceremony on Feb. 14 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2009 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago. The tradition of AAAS fellows began in 1874. Fellows are voted on by the AAAS Council, the policymaking body of the association. Fellows are recognized for their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.