Three Yale affiliates elected to National Academy of Sciences

Image: 
May 3, 2023

Two Yale faculty members and a Yale-affiliated researcher have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Anna Marie Pyle, Michel Devoret, and Samuel (Harvey) Moseley are among 120 new members elected to the academy, which was established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on a U.S. scientist or engineer.

Twenty-three international members were also elected this year.

The new members bring the total number of active members to 2,565 and the total number of international members to 526.

Michel Devoret, the F.W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics and Physics, who has been a member of the Yale faculty since 2002, has conducted seminal research on qubits, the “artificial atoms” at the heart of quantum information science. Along with Yale colleagues including Robert Schoelkopf and Steven Girvin, Devoret has done pioneering work in the field of superconducting qubits with controllable dynamics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of the Micius Quantum Prize (together with John Clarke and Yasunobu Nakamura), the Ampere Prize of the French Academy of Science (with Daniel Esteve), the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands, the Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society (with Esteve, Hans Mooij, and Nakamura), and the Olli Lounasmaa Memorial Prize of Aalto University. He is also a recipient of the John Stewart Bell Prize (with Schoelkopf) and the Fritz London Memorial Prize (with John Martinis and Schoelkopf). Devoret is a member of the Yale Quantum Institute.

Anna Marie Pyle, Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and professor of chemistry, is a biochemist and structural biologist whose lab has made important discoveries related to RNA structure and RNA recognition by protein enzymes. Her work has led to an array of cancer-fighting molecules, anti-fungal compounds, and a map of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. She joined the Yale faculty in 2002. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a three-time recipient of awards from the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 1997. She is a past president of the RNA Society and recipient of the RNA Society Lifetime Service Award.

Samuel Moseley, a research affiliate at Wright Laboratory, was a key member of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer science and development team and he invented and led the advance of cryogenic X-ray microcalorimeters, which are central to the scientific capability of current and future X-ray astrophysics missions. He also led the creation of microshutter arrays for the James Webb Space Telescope. He has received the Joseph Weber Award of the American Astronomical Society, the George Goddard Prize of the international society of optics and photonics (SPIE) and was conferred the rank of Distinguished Senior Professional by President Barack Obama.

- Yale News