The National Academy of Sciences

The National Academies provide expert advice to the U.S. government on issues of science, health, and engineering and, today, comprise three private, nonprofit institutions: The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and National Academy of Medicine (NAM). The NAS is the oldest of these, established by the U.S. Congress in 1863.

Membership to the Academies is considered one of the highest honors bestowed to a U.S. scientist. Below is a list of the many IRP scientists, past and present, elected to the NAS. Click to view our list of NAM members and NAE members.

Current IRP scientists elected to the NAS (year of election):

• Thomas Kunkel (2024). Dr. Kunkel investigates the fidelity and efficiency of DNA replication and the DNA repair processes that control cell survival and genome stability. His lab also studies how environmental stresses perturb these processes, resulting in cell death, cellular mutations, and adverse effects on human health.
• Kyung J. Kwon-Chung (2024). Dr. Kwon-Chung's lab studies Cryptococcus neoformans and Aspergillus fumigatus, two of the most common and serious fungal pathogens that primarily affect patients with weakened immune systems. Her research probes factors that make patients more likely to contract these fungal infections, as well as how patients' bodies respond to them.
• Steven A. Rosenberg (2024). Dr. Rosenberg has pioneered the development of immunotherapy that has resulted in the first effective immunotherapies for selected patients with advanced cancer. His studies of cell transfer immunotherapy have resulted in durable complete remissions in patients with metastatic melanoma. He has also pioneered the development of gene therapy and was the first to successfully insert foreign genes into humans. His recent studies of the adoptive transfer of genetically modified lymphocytes, a type of immune cell, has resulted in the regression of metastatic cancer in patients with melanoma, sarcomas and lymphomas.
• Giorgio Trinchieri (2024). Dr. Trinchieri's research examines many aspects of the complex cross-talk between inflammation and cancer, including the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating the activity of certain classes of immune cells and how the environment around a tumor interacts with the immune system to suppress an immune response to the disease.
• Sandra Wolin (2024). Dr. Wolin investigates how noncoding RNAs function, how cells recognize and degrade defective RNAs, and how failure to degrade these RNAs affects cell function and contributes to human disease. Her research includes studies of how RNA surveillance pathways contribute to normal cell physiology and prevent diseases such as cancer.
• Andre Nussenzweig (2023). Dr. Nussenzweig studies how cells repair a form of DNA damage called a double strand break (DSB), which can lead to cancer. The main goals of his research are to determine the mechanisms by which cells detect, signal and repair DSBs; elucidate the mechanisms by which cancer-causing genomic translocations occur; and determine the influence of chromatin structure on the maintenance of genomic stability.
• John O'Shea (2023). Dr. O'Shea's research seeks to understand how CD4+ T cells differentiate to selectively produce cytokines, molecules that are crucial to the proper functioning of the immune system, and to better define the molecular basis of cytokine action. By studying how engagement of cytokine receptors transduce signals that, in turn, regulate transcription factors and epigenetic events to modulate gene expression, he aims to reveal how T cells participate in host defense and contribute to the pathogenesis of immune-mediated diseases, with the ultimate goal of using his discoveries to facilitate the development of new therapeutic approaches.
• Deborah Morrison (2022). Dr. Morrison is a leader in the study of the RAF ­protein kinases, which play a key role in cellular growth and development. Dysregulation of RAF activity contributes to human diseases, including cancer and certain developmental syndromes. Her work has provided critical insights into the biochemical and structural basis of RAF activation and has guided the design of new therapeutic strategies.
• Julie Segre (2022). Dr. Segre develops methods to characterize microbial communities with genomic sequencing and analysis, which offer significant advantages over traditional culture-based studies to capture microbial diversity. She has contributed to foundational studies of the human skin microbiome and the tracking of hospital-associated bacterial pathogens.
• John T. Schiller (2020). Dr. Schiller has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and the development of the HPV vaccine. He applies his discoveries to the development of prevention and treatment strategies not just for HPV but also for other sexually transmitted infections, as well as chronic diseases like cancer.
• Robert Tycko (2020). Dr. Tycko's work aims to expand the capabilities of experimental techniques for investigating the structural properties of molecules important to human biology and disease, with a particular focus on solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). His experiments have provided new insights into the structures and physical behavior of proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes, and AIDS.
• Michael J. Lenardo (2019). Dr. Lenardo studies the molecular regulation of T lymphocytes, particularly as it relates to immunological tolerance, apoptosis, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes mellitus, and similar diseases. He uses contemporary genomic approaches to discover the molecular basis of new genetic diseases of the immune system, as well as to develop new techniques for treating autoimmune conditions.
• Elaine Ostrander (2019). Dr. Ostrander is a pioneer in the field of comparative genomics, having initiated the canine genome project in 1993. Her studies of the domestic dog led to a well-phenotyped species, revealing a population structure that can be used to examine and solve fundamental biological problems. Her work has advanced human understanding of mammalian growth and development, morphologic variation, behavior, and disease susceptibility, especially cancer.
• Michael M. Gottesman (2018). Dr. Gottesman investigates how cancer cells become resistant to chemotherapeutic drugs and has identified numerous genes and processes that underlie the ability of tumor cells to protect themselves from these compounds. His exploration of the multidrug resistance (MDR1) gene has led to important discoveries regarding how cancer drugs are transported into and out of cells.
• Clare M. Waterman (2018). Dr. Waterman focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of cellular motion, making key contributions to our understanding of the cellular cytoskeleton, including how integrin, microtubules, and filamentous actin work together to produce movement. She has also created cutting-edge technologies such as quantitative fluorescent speckle microscopy (qFSM) that have enabled new studies and insights into these systems.
• Ronald N. Germain (2016). Dr. Germain studies basic aspects of innate and adaptive immune function, with an emphasis on the biochemical mechanisms involved in discrimination between self and foreign peptide-associated MHC molecules by T-cells as well as on T-cell antigen-presenting cell interactions and the subsequent delivery of effector function.
• Eugene Koonin (2016). Dr. Koonin performs research in many areas of evolutionary genomics and takes advantage of the advances of comparative genomics and systems biology to address fundamental problems in evolutionary biology. Koonin hypothesized in 2005 that “spacer DNA” in the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) loci of bacteria and archaea, which matched sequences of bacteriophages, could be a key part of a sort of adaptive immune system.
• Alan G. Hinnebusch (2015). Dr. Hinnebusch studies the regulation of amino acid biosynthetic genes in budding yeast as a means of dissecting molecular mechanisms of gene regulation at the translational and transcriptional levels. Topics include mechanisms and regulation of translation initiation; regulation of eIF2a kinase GCN2; and mechanism of transcriptional activation by GCN4.
• Warren J. Leonard (2015). Dr. Leonard discovered multiple specific forms of immunodeficiency, including those caused by mutations in the genes encoding the intracellular signaling molecule JAK3, which associates with γc, and the receptor for IL-7. Early in his career, Leonard cloned and characterized the human receptor for the immune cytokine IL‑2, making him the first to clone the receptor for a type 1 cytokine.
• Carolina Barillas-Mury (2014). Dr. Barillas-Mury is recognized for her work on mosquito immune responses that limit Plasmodium infection and the discovery of a mechanism of parasite immune evasion that enables malaria transmission.
• G. Marius Clore (2014). Dr. Clore is a biophysicist recognized for his pioneering work on the development of NMR for determining three-dimensional solution structures of biological macromolecules and extending the frontiers of NMR to ever more complex systems.
• Shiv Grewal (2014). Dr. Grewal is recognized for groundbreaking research in the field of epigenetics; his work provided fundamental insight into heterochromatin formation, a compact form of chromatin that inhibits inappropriate gene expression and ensures genome stability.
• Louis M. Staudt (2013). Dr. Staudt pioneered the use of gene expression profiling to discover molecularly and clinically distinct cancer subtypes and to predict response to therapy, particularly molecular subtypes of lymphoma.
• Wei Yang (2013). Dr. Yang is a structural biologist who has identified unexpected enzymatic activity in proteins that plays an essential role in maintaining genome stability by demonstrating adenosine triphosphatase (elected in ATPase) activity in MutL, a key protein that corrects DNA replication errors.
• Gisela Storz (2012). Early in her career, Dr. Storz elucidated a key mechanism of the bacterial response to oxidative stress, demonstrating for the first time that oxidation of proteins could regulate gene expression. In recent years, her interests have expanded to include the systematic identification and characterization of small, non-coding RNAs and small proteins that have introduced a new dimension to the regulation of bacterial metabolism and responses to stress.
• Attila Szabo (2010). Dr. Szabo has been recognized for developing novel theoretical analyses for a wide variety of experiments and for bringing leadership to the service of biological physics. His research interests include fluorescence depolarization and NMR relaxation of probes in macromolecules and membranes, the study of chemical reaction dynamics, the influence of diffusion on the kinetics of ligand binding and protein folding, and analysis of single molecule fluorescence and force spectroscopic experiments.
• Daniel Kastner (2010). Dr. Kastner has a long-standing interest in complex genetic disorders of inflammation, and has been instrumental in identifying the genetic mutations and affected pathways of a number of diseases within the systemic autoinflammatory diseases group, including Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF), TNF-receptor associated periodic syndrome (TRAPS), and neonatal multisystem inflammatory disease (NOMID).
• Douglas R. Lowy (2009). He is a leader in viral oncology and has made fundamental advances in murine retroviruses, RAS oncogenes, and the papillomaviruses. His work has directly contributed to the development of highly effective prophylactic vaccines against HPVs (human papillomaviruses) linked to cervical cancer.
• Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz (2008). Her research has revolutionized our understanding of the dynamics of membrane proteins and the assembly of intracellular organelles-specifically the reversible flow of proteins between the endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi, and the mechanisms of nuclear envelope and Golgi breakdown and re-assembly during mitosis.
• Thomas E. Wellems (2007). He made central discoveries in malaria biology, including the transport molecule responsible for chloroquine resistance, and the var gene family responsible for the antigenic variation and adherence of infected red blood cells. He provided the first evidence that a mutation protects against cerebral malaria by reducing var expression on the red blood cell surface.
• William A. Eaton (2006). His spectroscopic experiments form the foundation for investigations of protein conformational dynamics and allostery. His studies of sickle-cell hemoglobin greatly advanced our molecular understanding of sickle-cell disease and motivated new therapeutic approaches. His laser-triggering experiments revealed the time scales and mechanisms of the initial events in protein folding.
• Susan G. Amara (2004). Her laboratory examines the impact of psychostimulant and antidepressant drugs on the signaling properties, physiology and acute regulation of biogenic amine transporters. Her research demonstrated that transporters can serve dual functions as transporters and as substrate-gated ion channels, revealing additional mechanisms by which carriers regulate neuronal excitability.
• Sue Hengren Wickner (2004). She is a major contributor to the understanding of protein machines essential for DNA replication. She discovered that some replication enzymes function to guide proteins to specific sites and that others remodel inactive complexes. She found that a subunit of the prokarytotic proteosome-like protease is a molecular chaperone.
• Joseph F. Fraumeni (2002). He is a leading cancer epidemiologist who has uncovered both genetic and environmental determinants of cancer. By creating maps depicting geographic variation in cancer mortality at the county level in the United States, he developed a way to identify environmental and lifestyle exposures driving the patterns of certain malignancies. In addition, as co-discoverer of several genetic and familial syndromes predisposing to cancer, he has provided new insights into the genetic component of cancer causation.
• Adriaan Bax (2002). He has been one of the pioneers in the development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, abbreviated as NMR. This technique is widely used to determine the atomic structure of molecules, including the motions and three-dimensional structures of proteins. He has created some of the newest methods of high-resolution NMR spectroscopy and used these techniques to extend our abilities to probe protein structure and function.
• Harvey Alter (2002). He has been a major contributor in the fight to reduce the incidence of transfusion-induced hepatitis, which occurred in 30 percent of transfusions in 1970 and in almost none in the year 2000. He discovered non-A-non-B hepatitis (also known as hepatitis C) and described the natural history of hepatitis C. Alter also co-discovered the Australia antigen that signals the presence of hepatitis B.
• Reed B. Wickner (2000). His imaginative studies of infectious elements of Saccaromyces increased our understanding of RNA virus replication, assembly and virus-host interactions. His discovery of yeast prions (infectious proteins), dramatically transformed this field. He showed these prions are responsible for some inherited traits and that one prion is composed of amyloid.
• Malcolm A. Martin (1998). He is a virologist who has made many significant contributions to our understanding of papovaviruses, of the retroviruses that hide in all of our cells, and of the virus that causes AIDS, called HIV. He conducted critical risk assessment experiments that allowed the safe molecular cloning of DNA from animals to proceed, and he continues to be a leader of molecular and biological investigations of AIDS.
• Susan Gottesman (1998). She has been a pioneer in an exploding area of biological regulation in which enzymes that destroy specific other proteins, called proteases, play a central role inside the cell. In groundbreaking work, she discovered and elucidated the central features of a whole new family of proteases that require energy for their function in the form of ATP-hydrolysis.
• Kiyoshi Mizuuchi (1994). He has probably made more contributions to understanding DNA rearrangements than anyone else. He has made major advances in determining the molecular mechanism of DNA gyrase, lambda integrative recombination, Holliday structure resolution, phage mu transposition and retroviral integration.
• Sankar Adhya (1994). Through his elegant synthesis of biochemical and genetic methods, he has made many seminal discoveries in bacterial gene regulation. His findings offer new insights into how proteins that regulate both initiation and termination of transcription interact with polynucleotides and with each other to control gene expression from dispersed genetic sites.
• Francis S. Collins (1993). He is known for his application of applied novel methods for detecting the mutations responsible for genetic disorders, starting with information on the chromosomal position of the gene. Collins has referred to this as positional cloning and has applied it with success to the elucidation of cystic fibrosis and neurofibromatosis.
• Edward D. Korn (1990). He obtained early evidence for actin filaments in nonmuscle cells and for their association with the plasma membrane; elucidated the regulatory roles of actin-binding proteins and ATP hydrolysis in actin polymerization; and discovered single-headed, non-filamentous myosins and the regulation of nonmuscle myosins by heavy chain phosphorylation.
• Louis H. Miller (1990). His discoveries of receptor-mediated invasion of red cells by the malaria parasite and their knob-associated endothelial adherence have greatly clarified the biology and pathophysiology of malaria. His contributions on the immunology of malaria, at both the cellular and molecular levels, provide hope for better means of control of this important disease.
• Thomas Reese (1987). His pioneering work in rapid freeze-fracture electron microscopy has opened a new field of cryobiology applied to the nervous system. He has helped resolve long-standing questions in three important areas.
• Bernard Moss (1987). He has isolated and characterized numerous enzymes from vaccinia virus particles; is a codiscoverer of mRNA capping; identified various vaccinia virus genes and sequenced their promoters; and shown how to use vaccinia virus DNA as an expression vector for foreign genes, particularly those that encode antigens of clinical importance.
• Martin Gellert (1986). In seminal work showing the importance of the topological properties of DNA, he discovered DNA gyrase and is the codiscoverer of DNA ligase, two major enzymes of DNA metabolism. He initiated an entirely new research area concerned with the energetics and mechanochemistry of DNA as it functions in gene expression, replication, and recombination.
• Ira Pastan (1982). Dr. Pastan pioneered the field of receptor biology in animal cells and identified a major receptor-mediated pathway of gene regulation in bacteria; his seminal work in receptor biology has resulted in numerous important discoveries, including treatments for several drug-resistant cancers.
• Gary Felsenfeld (1976). Dr. Felsenfeld is a pioneer in the study of the regulation of gene expression, particularly on the ways in which chromatin structure serves to regulate gene activity in eukaryotes.

Former IRP scientists elected to the NAS (year of election):

• Yasmine Belkaid (2017)
• Lutz Birnbaumer (1994)
• Christian Anfinsen (1963)
• Charles Armstrong (1944)
• G. Gilbert Ashwell (1979)
• Gerald D. Aurbach (1986)
• Julius Axelrod (1971)
• Robert W. Berliner (1968)
• Baruch Blumberg (1975)
• Roscoe O. Brady (1975)
• Bernard B. Brodie (1966)
• Maurice Burg (1991)
• Giulio L. Cantoni (1983)
• Robert M. Chanock (1973)
• William Mansfield Clark (1928)
• Kenneth S. Cole (1956)
• Erminio Costa (1982)
• John Daly (1997)
• David R. Davies (1978)
• Igor B. Dawid (1981)
• Vincent DeVita, Jr. (1985)
• Edward V. Evarts (1976)
• Anthony Fauci (1992)
• Donald S. Fredrickson (1973)
• D. Carleton Gajdusek (1974)
• Robert C. Gallo (1988)
• Harold S. Ginsberg (1982)
• Barney Graham (2022)
• William Archer Hagins (1979)
• Roy Hertz (1972)
• Claude Silbert Hudson (1927)
• Robert J. Huebner (1960)
• Seymour Kaufman (1986)
• Seymour S. Kety (1962)
• George Khoury (1987)
• Richard M. Krause (1977)
• Philip Leder (1979)
• Michael Lichten (2022)
• David J. Lipman (2003)
• Henry Metzger (1992)
• Mortimer Mishkin (1984)
• Howard A. Nash (1990)
• Elizabeth Neufeld (1977)
• Marshall Nirenberg (1967)
• William E. Paul (1982)
• Michael Potter (1981)
• Robert H. Purcell (1988)
• Joseph Edward Rall (1980)
• Matilda White Riley (1994)
• Martin Rodbell (1987)
• John Robbins (1996)
• Wallace Rowe (1975)
• Lyndon Frederick Small (1941)
• Maxine Singer (1979)
• Louis Sokoloff (1980)
• Earl Stadtman (1969)
• Thressa C. Stadtman (1981)
• DeWitt Stetten, Jr. (1974)
• Herbert Tabor (1977)
• Leslie G. Ungerleider (2000)
• Martha Vaughan (1985)
• Harold E. Varmus (1984)
• Thomas A. Waldmann (1985)
• Bernhard Witkop (1969)
• George F. Vande Woude (1993)
• Carl Wu (2006)
• Robert H. Wurtz (1988)
• Ralph W. Wyckoff (1949)
• Robert Zwanzig (1972)