NAS elects new members

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) elected 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries in May. This brings the total active membership to 2,291 and the number of foreign associates—nonvoting members with citizenship outside the U.S.—to 465.

Election to NAS, which is more than 150 years old, recognizes scientists and engineers for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research and is considered one of the highest scientific honors bestowed in the U.S. This year, 15 of the newly elected are members of the American Chemical Society or work in areas related to the chemical sciences.

The new U.S. members are Bonnie Bartel, Rice University; Roberto Car, Princeton University; Arup Chakraborty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Hongjie Dai, Stanford University; Joseph DeRisi, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California, San Francisco; John Eiler, California Institute of Technology; Richard Friesner, Columbia University; Marsha I. Lester, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Susan Marqusee, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and UC Berkeley; Hidde Ploegh, MIT; Melanie Sanford, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Michael Summers, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Peidong Yang, UC Berkeley.

The two new foreign associate members are Daan Frenkel, University of Cambridge (citizenship, the Netherlands), and Ian A. Wilson, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif. (citizenship, U.K.).