UC Berkeley Press Release
5 faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences
BERKELEY – The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which represents the nation's elite scientists and engineers and serves as official adviser to the federal government, announced today (Tuesday, April 25) the election of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates, including five University of California, Berkeley, faculty members.
The newly elected UC Berkeley faculty members are Jillian F. Banfield, professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management; Robert P. Lin, professor of physics and director of UC Berkeley's Spaces Sciences Laboratory; Michael A. Marletta, Aldo DeBenedictis Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and professor of molecular and cell biology; David A. Patterson, professor of electrical engineering and computer science; and Dan-Virgil Voiculescu, professor of mathematics. Banfield and Marletta also are faculty scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
UC Berkeley now boasts 132 members of the academy, a 143-year-old private organization of scientists and engineers that advises the nation's leaders, upon request, in matters of science and technology
"Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in American science and engineering," said UC Irvine Chancellor Ralph Cicerone, who became president of the academy in 2005, in an academy press release.
Barbara Schaal, an NAS member since 1999 who was elected last year as the academy's first woman vice president, noted in a statement today, "This year's new class represents outstanding accomplishment in a wide variety of disciplines."
Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,013. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the academy, with citizenship outside the United States. Today's election brings the total number of foreign associates to 371.