About the Award
The John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science is awarded every two years, to recognize noteworthy and distinguished accomplishments in any field of science within the National Academy of Science’s charter. The award is presented with a medal and a $25,000 prize. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company established the award to honor the memory of their Chief Engineer, Vice President, and general telecommunications innovator, John J. Carty.
Joseph Henrich, Harvard University, will receive the 2026 John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science.
Henrich’s fundamental contributions have transformed our understanding of how cultural evolutionary forces shape human behavior and psychology.
He was among the first to integrate ethnographic and experimental approaches from anthropology, economics and psychology to test theoretical models of cultural evolution across diverse human societies. These efforts marked a major transition in multiple fields.
His work has provided key insights into the nature of prestige, the origins of religions and the evolution of kinship systems. This research explores how social norms shape human behavior, cooperation, and societal development, offering a foundation for understanding how and why psychology varies across human populations and over centuries.
Henrich’s wide-ranging theoretical and empirical work has influenced research across anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, economics, economic development, history, and religion. In addition to his extensive body of peer-reviewed research articles, he has also written two award-winning books, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Making Us Smarter and The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
Watch him receive the award online during the 163rd NAS Annual Meeting on April 26th.
Award History
In 1932, John J. Carty became both the namesake of the award as well as the first recipient. Carty was recognized for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of telecommunications. In the absence of a high school degree, Carty was the epitome of the self-made man, teaching himself the technology behind telecommunications and slowly working his way through the industry. From his self-taught background, Carty made several outstanding contributions to furthering technological advancement in the telephone and telegraph industry. Between 1883 and 1896, Carty received 24 patents for telecommunications, including the battery-powered switchboard. He played an instrumental role in establishing the first successful transmission of voice by radio telephone across the Atlantic, the opening of the transcontinental telephone line, and later, the first two-way conversation across the Atlantic. Carty’s work facilitated the rapid progress and implementation of the telephone network across the United States and overseas.
Previous recipients of the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science continue to achieve outstanding advancements in their fields. Eight recipients have been honored with a National Medal of Science, and 10 recipients have received a Nobel Prize in Physics (Bragg 1915; Townes 1964; Gell-Mann 1969; Taylor 1993), in Chemistry (Langmuir 1932; Bertozzi 2022), in Medicine (Watson 1962), in Economics (Ostrom 2009), and in Economic Sciences (Milgrom 2020; Wilson 2020).
Most Recent Recipient
