National Academy Honors Achievements

Next month at a ceremony in Washington, DC, the National Academy of Sciences will recognize 18 individuals for their contributions in different fields of science, including chemistry and the Earth sciences.

The academy will present its Award in Chemical Sciences to Harry Gray, Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. This annual award recognizes innovative research in the chemical sciences that contributes to a better understanding of the natural sciences and that benefits humanity. Gray is being cited for his “demonstration of long-range electron tunneling in proteins, his inspirational teaching and mentoring of students, and his unselfish service as a statesman of chemistry.” He will receive a medal and cash prize of $20 000.

John Wasson will be the recipient of the J. Lawrence Smith Medal, which NAS presents every three years for recent original and meritorious investigations of meteoric bodies. The academy is acknowledging him for his “important studies on the classification, origin, and early history of iron meteorites and chondritic meteorites, and on the mode of formation of chondrules.” Wasson, who holds joint appointments in UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and in the departments of Earth and space sciences and of chemistry and biochemistry, will receive a medal and $25 000.

To honor contributions to geology and paleontology, the academy’s Mary Clark Thompson Medal will go to Frederik Hilgen, university lecturer on the faculty of Earth sciences at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Hilgen is being cited for his “meticulous integration of various geological, geophysical, and proxy cyclostratigraphic sedimentological records in developing a Late Neogene (12–0 Ma) astronomical time scale.” He will receive a medal and a cash prize of $15 000. The award is given approximately every three years.