National Academy of Sciences elects Chicago chemist Stephen Berry as home secretary

R. Stephen Berry, James Franck Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, has been elected as home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, an advisory organization to U.S. policy makers on scientific issues. His four-year term will begin July 1.

As home secretary, Berry will oversee membership activities of the academy and serve as secretary of its governing council. He also will assume chairmanship of the National Research Council’s Report Review Committee, which conducts a thorough review of the hundreds of policy studies the council produces each year. These reports examine issues ranging from AIDS to obesity and from science education to nuclear waste.

Elected to the academy in 1980, Berry is active in National Research Council programs. He most recently chaired the Committee on Issues in the Transborder Flow of Scientific Data, which resulted in the 1997 report, “Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data.”

Berry also is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. He was one of the first two chemists to receive a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1983.

Berry conducts research in atomic collisions, thermodynamics, the efficient use of energy resources, the behavior of subnanoscale particles and their relation to proteins, and intellectual property and electronic scientific communication.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, non-profit organization established by an act of Congress in 1863 to elect to membership outstanding scientists and engineers and to serve as an independent adviser to the federal government on science and technology issues. Its current membership totals 1,800, and with its sister institutions, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, it oversees the work of the National Research Council.

All of the NRC’s published reports are available in full text at http://www.nas.edu