Five faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

Five Stanford professors have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. Recognized for their distinguished and original contributions to scientific research were Persis Drell, Jerome Friedman, Steven Kivelson, Roeland Nusse and Lee Ross. There are now 2,097 active members in the academy. Since 1863, the academy has advised the federal government in the areas of its expertise. Election to the academy is one of the highest honors an American scientist or engineer can receive. Persis Drell is the director of the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford. Drell's scientific career has included work on fundamental properties of particle physics, such as the nonconservation of parity in weak interactions, and particle astrophysics with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, on which she is a collaborator.