How to Nominate
Nominations are now being accepted for the 2025 Awards. Awards will be presented in a variety of fields including biophysics, microbiology, astronomy, medical sciences, and more.
Nominations will be accepted online through Monday, October 7.
This Year’s Award Recipients
The 2024 awards 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.
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.
Featured Awards
Awards by Field
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Biology and Medicine
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Engineering and Applied Sciences
Physical Sciences and Mathematics
General
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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.