Nelson Polsby, UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science, passed away last night. Nelson ranked among the very best political scientists studying American politics. He will surely be missed. Here is a brief biography:

Nelson W. Polsby is Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught American politics and government since 1967. He was born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1934, educated at Johns Hopkins (B.A.), Brown and Yale (M.A., Ph.D.) and has taught at Wisconsin and Wesleyan as well as at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, the London School of Economics, Oxford and Stanford on a visiting basis. From 1988-99 he was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley. He is currently a Vice President of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the American Enterprise Institute of Washington, D.C. He served on the Yale University Council, 1978-2000 (President, 1986-1993). He has held Guggenheim Fellowships twice, fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences twice, and a Brookings Fellowship, among other honors, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Public Administration. He holds the Wilbur Cross Medal and the Yale Medal of Yale University, an Honorary Litt.D. from the University of Liverpool, an M.A. from Oxford University, and a Docteur Honoris Causa from the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan.
Professor Polsby is editor of the Annual Review of Political Science, political science editor of The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, a former managing editor of the American Political Science Review and currently serves on the editorial boards of five scholarly journals. His books include How Congress Evolves (2004), Presidential Elections (with Aaron Wildavsky, 11th ed., 2004), Congress and the Presidency (4th ed., 1986), Political Innovation in America (1984), Consequences of Party Reform (1983), Community Power and Political Theory (2nd ed., 1980), Political Promises (1974), British Government and its Discontents (with Geoffrey Smith, 1981), New Federalist Papers (with Alan Brinkley and Kathleen Sullivan, 1997), and as editor, with Gary R. Orren, Media and Momentum (1987), with R.L. Peabody, New Perspectives on the U.S. House of Representatives (4th ed., 1992), and, with Fred I. Greenstein, the eight volume Handbook of Political Science (1975) among other works.