NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science
The NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science has been presented by the National Academy of Sciences since 1990 for scientific achievements with important industrial applications serving the common good.
Award winners
- 1990 Carl Djerassi for contributions to steroid chemistry and the first successful oral contraceptive.
- 1993 Nick Holonyak for Semiconductor Materials and Devices, Including Convenient Light Emitting Diodes (LED)
- 1996 John H. Sinfelt for discovering the principle of bimetal cluster catalysis and the widely used catalyst for unleaded gasoline.
- 1999 Ralph F. Hirschmann for the chemical design and synthesis of numerous drugs, including anti-inflammatory steroids and antihypertensive agents.
- 2002 to Craig Venter for his leadership role in the human genome sequencing project, the use of Expressed Sequence Tags in gene analysis and the analysis of the genome of microbes.
- 2005 Philip Needleman for elucidating the metabolism of arachidonic acid and its role in diseases and the production of prostacyclin and thromboxane .
- 2008 Robert Fraley for technologies that made the first transgenic grains possible.
- 2011 H. Boyd Woodruff for various antibiotics, vitamin B 12 and the avermectins .
- 2014 James C. Liao for the production of higher alcohols than biofuels from sugar, cellulose, protein waste or carbon dioxide.
- 2017 Robert H. Dennard for fundamental contributions to microelectronics with the invention of DRAM and CMOS scaling.
- 2020 Shuji Nakamura for the development of gallium nitride LEDs