Three Berkeley faculty elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Three UC Berkeley faculty members, including two molecular biologists and one economist, have been elected to join the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a 158-year-old institution whose membership recognizes distinguished achievements in original research.

The three are among 120 new members elected to the NAS in 2021, including a record 59 women. They bring the total number of living Berkeley faculty who are NAS members to 145.

Here are the 2021 Berkeley honorees:

Barbara Baker is an adjunct professor of plant and microbial biology and a senior scientist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service. Her lab studies the genetic, molecular and biochemical processes that govern how plants and microbes interact, with a particular focus on how plants develop resistance to pathogen-induced diseases.

David Card is a labor economist and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where his work has focused on inequality and the social and economic forces impacting low-wage workers. He is best known for pioneering studies in the 1990s, still acutely relevant today, that challenge common assumptions about the effect of minimum wage increases on U.S. job growth and on the impact of immigration on native-born U.S. workers.

Plant and microbial biology professor N. Louise Glass is a leading researcher in the molecular genetics of the fungus Neurospora, including the genetics of mating, nonself recognition, and lignocellulose decomposition. Utilizing genetics, genomics and biochemical tools, her work focuses on fungal enzyme-secretion pathways and fungal regulatory networks to understand possible applications of fungi to bioenergy.