05/04/2026
Cliff Brangwynne has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.
Brangwynne was one of eight Princeton professors elected this year. The other seven were Chris Chang, Maria Chudnovsky, Jianqing Fan, Sabine Kastner, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Sigman and Christopher Skinner. This marks the largest number of new academy members from Princeton University in at least a century.
These eight professors are among the 120 new members and 25 international members chosen in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to the academy’s announcement.
Established in 1863, the academy now has 2,705 active members and 557 international members, who are nonvoting members of the academy with citizenship outside the United States.
Brangwynne is Princeton’s June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the director of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute. He is an associated faculty member in the Princeton Materials Institute.
Brangwynne’s research focuses on teasing apart the fundamental principles behind biological organization, particularly the biomolecular condensates that form inside living cells. Despite having no surrounding cell walls, these tiny organelles contain RNA, proteins and complex processing bodies. His research team is also engineering entirely new kinds of organelles for biomedical applications. Brangwynne joined the Princeton faculty in 2011. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the co-director of the seven-week summer physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Read more: https://materials.princeton.edu/news/2026/cliff-brangwynne-pioneer-cells-inner-structures-elected-national-academy-sciences?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social_media&utm_id=news26
