Two UMN professors elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Two University of Minnesota professors have been elected as members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for their excellence in original scientific research. They are Forest Resources Regents Professor Peter B. Reich and School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Mikhail Shifman.

Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer. Reich and Shifman are two of only 84 researchers nationwide to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. They will be inducted into the Academy next spring during the National Academy of Sciences 156th Annual Meeting.

Reich is the F.B. Hubachek Professor of Forest Ecology in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resources Sciences. He has an exemplary reputation internationally for his work in plant physiology, ecosystem ecology and global biology. His current research focuses on the impacts of global environmental change on terrestrial ecosystems, primarily forests and grasslands, and how that alters the global carbon cycle. Reich has published approximately 600 scientific papers, many of which have appeared in Nature, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He was named as a BBVA Prize Laureate in 2010, receiving their Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology and in 2011 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Shifman is the Ida Cohen Fine Professor of Theoretical Physics in the College of Science and Engineering’s William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute. He is known for a number of contributions to quantum chromodynamics, the theory of strong interactions and understanding of supersymmetric gauge dynamics. He is the author of more than eight books and more than 300 research papers. Shifman has received many honors for his work including the Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1993, the Sakurai Prize in 1999 and the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize in 2006.

The National Academy of Sciences is an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Among the Academy’s renowned members are Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell. About 200 Academy members have won Nobel Prizes.

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