Professor Samuel Gellman has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the organization announced this Tuesday.
Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors conferred on American scientists and engineers. The 151-year-old private organization was founded through an act of Congress signed by President Abraham Lincoln. Members of the academy has included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell. Each year, new fellows are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Gellman, the Ralph F. Hirschman Professor of Chemistry, joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1987. The Gellman research group works to reveal the ways proteins fold into the intricate shapes that make them valuable and productive in specific cellular processes. They have developed a new family of chemical agents — called amphiphiles — to remove cellular proteins for study. Other research efforts include the synthesis of new molecules to serve specific purposes, such as hybrid amino acids designed to interrupt the chemical communication between viruses and host cells.
Gellman will be inducted into the academy next April at the 150th annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Other academy members in the Department of Chemistry include professors Laura Kiessling, Charles Casey, James Skinner, Lawrence Dahl, and Fleming Crim.
Read more about the new fellows at UW-Madison here.