Member of the National Academy of Sciences

NAS members and international members

Three types of NAS membership exist:

1. Voting members, who must hold citizenship of the United States
2. Nonvoting international members, who have citizenship outside the United States
3. Emeritus members, who are no longer active and have rescinded their voting rights

As of May 2018 there were 2,382 active members and 484 international members, of whom approximately 190 have received Nobel Prizes. A full list of members can be found in the online members directory. See the list of members of the National Academy of Sciences and Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences for examples.

Notable member firsts

Some notable member firsts and records include:

• Edward C. Pickering (1846–1919) was the youngest scientist elected, only 26 years old at the time of his election in 1873
• Florence R. Sabin (1871–1953) was the first woman to be elected a member in 1924
• David Blackwell (1919–2010) was the first African American elected in 1965
• Marcia McNutt was the first woman to serve as president of the NAS, following her election as a member in 2005
• Ben Barres (1954–2017) was the first transgender scientist elected in 2013
• Frances Arnold was the first woman to be elected to all three National Academies in the United States – the National Academy of Engineering (NAE, 2000), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM, 2004) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, 2008)
• Richard Feynman resigned his NAS membership because of what he perceived as the Academy's elitism and in-group favoritism. Feynman outlines the reasons for his resignation in his published correspondence Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track Though arguably the most famous, Feynman was not alone. Richard Lewontin also resigned for principled reasons (as opposed, say, to ill-health) in 1972, and Josiah Whitney was the first member to resign, in 1874.

Member diversity

Critics have pointed to a lack of member diversity because of a selection bias for “old white men” who dominate membership of the Academy. Elite institutions such as the from Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, the University of California and Caltech also dominate membership, thereby perpetuating the Matthew effect. Diversity of age, disability, race, religion, gender and sexual orientation is lower in NAS than in the general population. For example, women in science are an underrepresented group in the Academy but the proportion of female members is slowly growing.

• In 1989, the academy had just 57 female members and 1,516 male members (3% female in total)
• In 2010, there were 14 newly elected women (19% new female inductees) from 72 new members
• In 2011, there were only 9 women (12% new female inductees) from 72 newly elected members.
• In 2012, the Academy elected 84 new members, with a record high of 26 women (30% new female inductees)
• In 2019, 50 women out of 125 new members were female (40% of new female inductees), another record high although the proportion of women in the academy as a whole is much lower than 40%

Persons of color are also underrepresented.