On Wednesday, April 22, 2026, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) announced its newest members – the 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research, and science elected in 2026, and Professor Helen Blackwell of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Chemistry was among them.
While excited by the honor, Blackwell conferred the credit to her group, “I am thrilled and humbled to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” Blackwell expressed. “This honor belongs as much to my incredible students and postdocs as it does to me, and it’s a joy to see our shared work at UW–Madison recognized.”
The Academy, chartered in 1780, was established to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic. The first members elected to the Academy include George Washington, who said – in his first annual message to Congress in 1790 – “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
“We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence – this is a fitting commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Academy President Laurie Patton. “The founding of the nation and the Academy are rooted in the inextricable links between a vibrant democracy, the free pursuit of knowledge, and the expansion of the public good.”
Blackwell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College (1994), a Ph.D from the California Institute of Technology (1999), and performed postdoctoral research at Harvard University from 1999-2002. She joined the UW–Madison Department of Chemistry in the fall of 2002 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Blackwell is currently the Norman C. Craig Professor of Chemistry and a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor.
Blackwell and her lab study how bacteria—among the simplest forms of life—use chemistry as a language. Her research focuses on the small molecules bacteria send and receive to sense how many neighbors are nearby and decide when to act as a group. When these chemical conversations reach a tipping point, bacteria can switch on collective behaviors that enable them to colonize and infect humans, livestock, and crops. By building and re-engineering these signals in the lab, Blackwell’s team creates new, synthetic bacterial “languages” that can be fed back to microbes to redirect their behavior. These tools reveal how microbial communication works at a fundamental level and how it shapes interactions between bacteria and their hosts, a source of discovery that continues to inspire her research more than two decades in.
The new class joins AAAS members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), and Jacques Derrida (1985) in the twentieth; and, in this century, Madeleine K. Albright (2001), Antonin Scalia (2003), Jennifer Doudna (2003), Esther Duflo (2009), John Legend (2017), Anna Deavere Smith (2019), Salman Rushdie (2022), Xuedong Huang (2023), and José Andrés (2025).
Click here for the complete list of members elected in 2026
Induction ceremonies for new members will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2026.