Julius Lukeš elected to the US National Academy of Sciences

Julius Lukeš of the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, CAS, was elected among international members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States. The NAS is a private nongovernmental institution to advise the nation on issues related to science and technology. This year´s elected 120 members and 24 international members bring the total number of active members to 2,617 and the total number of international members to 537.

Professor Lukeš is a scientist at the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, and a professor at the Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia. For more than twenty years, he´s been involved in the molecular biology of parasitic protozoa that cause a number of serious diseases. He is the author or co-author of four hundred publications in scientific journalswhich have been cited nearly 18,000 times to date with a Hirsch index of 63. In 2014 he was eclected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and one year later he became a Fellow of the European Academy of Microbiology. Since 2018 he is the Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 2023 he became an EMBO member.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars. Established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Scientists are elected by their peers to membership in the NAS for outstanding contributions to research. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community. Approximately 500 current and deceased members of the NAS have won Nobel Prizes, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1914, is today one of the premier international journals publishing the results of original research.

The first Czech scientist elected to the NAS was the neurophysiologist Jan Bureš (1926-2012) in 1995, the second, twenty years later, was the virologist Jan Svoboda (1934-2017). As an American citizen, chemist Josef Michl has been a full member since 1986. Since 2016, among the full members is also molecular biologist David M. Sabatini, who since 2023 has been working at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS. International members are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

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