2 UW professors elected to National Academy of Sciences

Jo Handelsman, Shannon Stahl

Jo Handelsman, Shannon Stahl

Two University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers — Jo Handelsman, professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and Shannon Stahl, Steenbock Professor of Chemical Sciences — have been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

Handelsman and Stahl are among 120 scientists elected this year in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to this week’s announcement from the academy. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.

Handelsman, a Vilas Research Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama as the associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy between stints on the faculty at UW–Madison and Yale University.

Stahl has been a member of the Department of Chemistry faculty since 1999 and is an affiliate of the Wisconsin Energy Institute. His research has made it simpler to make changes to chemicals, especially the addition of oxygen, and he has collaborated with industry to extend these methods to pharmaceutical synthesis. He received a Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and earned the 2020 ACS Catalysis lectureship from the American Chemical Society.

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