President Biden announced the latest recipients of the National Medal of Science —one our nation’s highest honors for exemplary achievement and leadership in science and technology. Among the recipients are three previous NAS award recipients.
Richard B. Alley, the 2014 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship recipient, is being honored for his trailblazing work in geology, which has reshaped our understanding of earth’s climate history. His decades of research in places like Antarctica and Greenland have made outstanding contributions to understanding ice and mountain glaciers.
Bonnie Bassler, the 2011 Richard Lounsbery recipient, is being honored for her discoveries revolutionizing our understanding of the microbial world.
R. Lawrence Edwards, the 2011 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship recipient, is being honored for his work that has transformed our understanding of Earth’s climate history, and shown how climate events have shaped the world over the last million years.
2024 Award Recipients
The 2024 award recipients were honored in an Award Ceremony at the 161st NAS Annual Meeting on April 28. They were recognized for their extraordinary scientific achievements in a wide range of fields spanning the physical, biological, social, and medical sciences.
Watch the recording, including a presentation by the 2024 Public Welfare Medalist, molecular biologist and women’s equality advocate Nancy Hopkins, on her courageous leadership over three decades to create and ensure equal opportunity for women in science.
The 2025 award recipients will be announced in January.
Awards Listing
Since 1886, the National Academy of Sciences has honored more than 1,000 individuals in the physical, biological, and social sciences through its awards program.
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Looking Forward
Previous NAS award recipients continue to achieve outstanding advancements in their fields. 120 have received a National Medal of Science, 80 have received a Nobel Prize, and 51 have a Lasker Award. Click on a recipient’s name to hear what they are working on now, how the award affected their careers, or the impact of their current work.
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Richard B. Alley, 2014 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship
Honored for his contributions to understanding the Earth’s past climate through high precision dating of ice cores and for his elucidation of the physical and chemical processes that govern the accumulation of ice and its movement in glaciers and ice streams.
Sabeeha Merchant, 2006 Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal
Honored for her pioneering discoveries in the assembly of metalloenzymes and the regulated biogenesis of major complexes of the photosynthetic apparatus in green algae.
Rodolphe Barrangou, 2018 NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences
Honored for his discovery of the genetic mechanisms and proteins driving CRISPR systems and their applications in food and agriculture, including virus resistance in the yogurt starter culture Streptococcus thermophilus and with the potential for translational genome editing in other microbes, crop plants and livestock.
Joseph L. DeRisi, 2014 John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science (genome biology)
Honored for pioneering efforts to develop new genomic technologies and using the technologies to make discoveries in virology that are of fundamental and practical importance.