2026 National Academy of Sciences Election: 120 New Members Announced

2026 NAS election at a glance

The 2026 National Academy of Sciences election added 120 new U.S. members, the annual maximum, and roughly 25 international members. That brought total active membership to 2,705, including 557 international members.[1] The official NAS page was not accessible during this research pass, so the totals here are taken from Forbes and checked against university announcements.

One source wrinkle is worth keeping visible: UCLA’s release gave a different international-member figure, saying 30 rather than roughly 25, so the international total is best read as a reporting discrepancy rather than a cleanly identical number across every announcement.[1][9]

Which institutions led the class

These counts reflect current faculty affiliations, not alumni totals. Harvard led the list with 15 electees, followed by Stanford with 9, Princeton with 8, UC Berkeley with 6, and MIT with 6. A second tier included UT Southwestern, UCLA, the University of Michigan, and Columbia, each with 3 electees.[1][2][3][4][5][8][9][10][11] Princeton said its eight electees make it the university’s largest single class in at least a century.[2]

The institutional leaderboard matters because it is one of the easiest ways to separate current-faculty recognition from broader university prestige talk. A school can have a large overall reputation and still not lead a particular academy class; here, the count is about who was elected while holding a current appointment, not who earned a degree there.

Notable names in the 2026 class

• Janet Yellen (UC Berkeley) stands out because Berkeley identified her as the first former U.S. Treasury Secretary elected to NAS while also having led the Federal Reserve and the Council of Economic Advisers.[3]
• Robert Sapolsky (Stanford) brings neuroscience and public writing together; Stanford highlighted his work on stress, behavior, and free will.[4]
• Scott Aaronson (UT Austin) adds quantum computing and science communication to the class. UT Austin noted that he was elected at age 44 and pointed to his widely read Shtetl-Optimized blog.[6]
• Andrew Gelman (Columbia) is one of the clearest statistics names in the group, which helps explain why this class is unusually legible to readers outside a single discipline.[1]
• Pardis Sabeti (Harvard/Broad) represents genetics and infectious-disease research, two areas that often show up in public-facing science coverage but do not always appear together in academy summaries.[5]
• Cliff Brangwynne (Princeton) anchors the Princeton cohort and gives the university’s unusually large class a recognizable bioengineering name.[2]

The breadth is the real story here. Economics, neuroscience, quantum computing, statistics, genetics, and bioengineering all appear in the same election class, which is why this set of members travels well beyond a routine campus news cycle.

What NAS membership actually signifies

The National Academy of Sciences was founded in 1863 through a congressional charter signed by Abraham Lincoln.[7] That history is the reason election to membership carries more weight than a typical honorific title: it is a formal peer-election system inside a federally chartered academy, not a ceremonial award handed out by an institution’s communications office.

For readers tracking academic honors, the useful takeaway is simple: the 2026 NAS election class was notable because it tied the annual U.S. cap and combined that with an unusually broad set of public-facing scholars and high-profile figures. Keep the source caveat in view — international totals vary slightly by release, and institutional counts are current-faculty counts rather than alumni counts — and the picture stays clean enough to use as a verified reference point for the 2026 national academy of sciences election members.

References

1. The National Academy of Sciences Elects 120 New Members for 2026 — Forbes — 2026-05-02
2. National Academy of Sciences elects eight Princeton professors — Princeton University — 2026-05-01
3. National Academy of Sciences elects six Berkeley researchers to its ranks — UC Berkeley — 2026-04-30
4. Faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences — Stanford University
5. Harvard faculty recognized by the National Academy of Sciences — Harvard University
6. UT Austin computer scientist elected to National Academy of Sciences — UT Austin
7. Member of the National Academy of Sciences — Wikipedia
8. UT Southwestern researchers elected to the National Academy of Sciences — UT Southwestern
9. 3 UCLA faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences in 2026 — UCLA
10. 3 University of Michigan professors join prestigious scientific academy — MLive
11. MIT affiliates elected to National Academy of Sciences — MIT