Gellman
Samuel Gellman, the Ralph F. Hirschmann Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the organization announced today.
Gellman is one of three UW-Madison faculty members to be elected to the academy this year, along with Professor of Chemical Engineering James Dumesic and Professor of Medical Microbiology and Immunology Margaret McFall-Ngai. They are among 84 new members of the 151-year-old academy.
Fellows are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership in the academy, a private organization founded through an act of Congress signed by President Abraham Lincoln, is one of the highest honors conferred on American scientists and engineers.
Gellman joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1987, and works to reveal the ways proteins fold into the intricate shapes that make them valuable and productive in specific cellular processes. His lab developed a new family of chemical agents — called amphiphiles — to remove cellular proteins for study. He synthesizes new molecules to serve specific purposes, such as hybrid amino acids designed to interrupt the chemical communication between viruses and host cells.
The new crop of members will be inducted in a year at the academy's next annual meeting, and bring the full membership count to 2,214 and the total number of foreign associates to 444.