National Academy of Sciences 2027 Awards: Sixteen Prizes From $15,000 to $200,000 — Including the $200,000 Arctowski Medal, the $100,000 Held Prize, and Two $75,000 Troland Awards — Nominations Close 5 October 2026
The National Academy of Sciences is accepting nominations for sixteen 2027 awards in fields from solar physics and microbiology to food and agriculture, experimental psychology, and combinatorial optimization, with prizes ranging from $15,000 to $200,000 and a single deadline of 5 October 2026.
National Academy of Sciences 2027 Awards: Sixteen Prizes From $15,000 to $200,000 — Including the $200,000 Arctowski Medal, the $100,000 Held Prize, and Two $75,000 Troland Awards — Nominations Close 5 October 2026
The National Academy of Sciences runs one of the oldest and best-funded prize programs in American science, and its 2027 cycle is open now. Sixteen awards are accepting nominations through Monday, 5 October 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, covering solar physics, meteoritics, phycology, microbiology, molecular biology, neuroscience, experimental psychology, theoretical computer science, chemistry, agriculture, and the public communication of science.
The money is real. The Arctowski Medal carries $200,000 in total — $100,000 to the recipient and $100,000 in research support directed to an institution of their choosing. The Michael and Sheila Held Prize and the NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences are each $100,000. The Richard Lounsbery Award is $75,000, and the Troland Research Awards give $75,000 to each of two early-career researchers every year.
The catch, and it is the thing most people miss: you cannot apply. Every NAS award is nomination-only, and self-nominations are rejected. If you want to be considered, someone else has to do the work — which means the practical task for most readers of this page is either nominating a colleague you admire, or making sure a senior scientist outside your institution knows the cycle is open and knows your case.
Key details at a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Program | National Academy of Sciences Awards, 2027 cycle |
| Awards open | 16 |
| Prize range | $15,000 to $200,000 |
| Nomination deadline | Monday, 5 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. Eastern |
| Nomination period opened | 26 April 2026 |
| Recipients announced | Mid-January 2027 |
| Self-nomination | Not accepted |
| NAS membership required to nominate | No |
| International nominees | Welcome, unless a specific award says otherwise |
| Nomination portal | awards-nasonline.secure-platform.com |
| Official guidance | nasonline.org/awards/how-to-nominate |
The sixteen awards open for 2027
Each award has its own field, cadence, and eligibility rules. Several run biennially or triennially, which means a prize that is open this year may not return until 2029 or 2030 — a reason not to defer a strong nomination.
| Award | Prize | Field | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arctowski Medal | $100,000 + $100,000 research support | Solar physics and solar-terrestrial relationships | Every 2 years |
| Michael and Sheila Held Prize | $100,000 | Combinatorial and discrete optimization, algorithms, complexity theory | Annual |
| NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences | $100,000 + medal | Agriculture and related sciences | Annual |
| Richard Lounsbery Award | $75,000 | Biology and medicine | Alternate years |
| Troland Research Awards (two given) | $75,000 each | Experimental psychology | Annual |
| NAS Award for Scientific Discovery | $50,000 + $50,000 research support | Rotates: astronomy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, materials science, physics | Every 2 years |
| Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal | $50,000 | Marine or freshwater algae | Every 3 years |
| J. Lawrence Smith Medal | $50,000 | Investigations of meteoric bodies | Every 3 years |
| James Prize in Science and Technology Integration | $50,000 | Cross-disciplinary research | Annual |
| Pradel Research Award | $50,000 to the recipient’s institution | Neuroscience | Annual |
| NAS Award in Molecular Biology | $25,000 + medal | Molecular biology | Annual |
| NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society | $20,000 | Chemistry meeting a societal need | Every 2 years |
| NAS Award in the Evolution of Earth and Life (Mary Clark Thompson Medal) | $20,000 | Geology and paleontology | Rotating |
| Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology | $20,000 | Microbiology | Annual |
| NAS Award in Chemical Sciences | $15,000 + medal | Chemical sciences | Annual |
| NAS Public Welfare Medal | Medal; no cash prize stated | Use of science for the public good | Annual |
A few of these deserve extra comment because their restrictions are easy to trip over.
The NAS Award in Molecular Biology is the tightest of the group: the nominee must be a United States citizen and no older than 50. It recognizes a recent notable discovery by a young scientist, not a career body of work, and it is sponsored by Pfizer. If your candidate is 51 or a permanent resident rather than a citizen, this is not the award.
The Richard Lounsbery Award is restricted to American and French scientists aged 45 or younger, and it alternates between the NAS and the French Académie des Sciences as presenting body. It exists specifically to encourage scientific exchange between the two countries.
The NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences targets mid-career scientists — defined as up to 20 years past completion of the PhD — working at a U.S. institution. Its scope is broader than the name suggests: plant and animal sciences, microbiology, nutrition, food science, soil science, entomology, veterinary medicine, and agricultural economics all qualify. It was established in 2016 with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research.
The NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society alternates its eligible population by year. Odd years go to chemists working in industry; even years to chemists in academia, government, and nonprofits. The 2027 cycle is an industry year.
The NAS Award for Scientific Discovery requires that the accomplishment being recognized was achieved within the previous five years and is expected to have significant impact. The nominee must work at a U.S. university, college, or research institution.
The Michael and Sheila Held Prize defines “recent work” as published within the last eight years — a longer window than most, and useful if the significance of a result took time to become clear. The 2026 prize went to five researchers jointly for the 2-to-2 Games Theorem, which is a good signal that genuinely collaborative theoretical work is welcome here.
The Troland Research Awards go to two early-career experimental psychologists each year, preferably aged 45 or younger, and are meant to further empirical research rather than only to honor past achievement.
Who should be nominating
The nominator pool is wider than most people assume. You do not need to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences to submit a nomination. Any scientist who knows the candidate’s work well enough to argue for it can put a nomination forward, subject to two structural rules:
- You may not be from the same institution as your nominee.
- Members of the NAS Council may not submit or support nominations at all.
There is also a conflict-of-interest rule that catches people out: you cannot nominate someone with whom you have or had an emotional relationship. That explicitly includes relatives, romantic partners, and your own former students or mentees. A postdoc advisor cannot nominate their own former postdoc. This is a real constraint on the natural instinct to have the person who knows the work best write the letter — the Academy wants distance.
Joint nominations are discouraged unless the nominees collaborated closely in the same laboratory. If two people at different institutions built a result together, expect to make a specific case for why they should be considered as a pair rather than separately.
What a nomination package contains
The required materials are compact, which is both good news and a trap. There is very little room to hide a thin argument.
- A nominator letter, three pages maximum. This explains the nominee’s work and why they should be selected. It is the centerpiece.
- A curriculum vitae for the nominee.
- A bibliography of up to twelve significant publications. Twelve, not everything. The selection itself is an argument.
- A suggested citation of 50 words. This is the sentence that would appear alongside the award if the nominee wins.
- Two letters of support. At most one may come from the nominee’s primary institution.
Everything is submitted through the NAS secure nomination platform at awards-nasonline.secure-platform.com. Age and date restrictions are evaluated as of 5 October 2026, so a candidate who turns 46 in November 2026 is still eligible for an award capped at 45.
How to build a nomination that competes
The three-page limit is the design constraint that shapes everything else. NAS selection committees are made up of working scientists reading many nominations in a narrow window, and the letters that survive are the ones that make a single, concrete, verifiable claim about what changed because of this person’s work.
Name the discovery, not the career. Most of these awards — particularly Scientific Discovery, Molecular Biology, the Held Prize, and the Evolution of Earth and Life medals — are attached to specific results within specific time windows. A letter that surveys twenty years of productivity reads as weaker than one that says: here is the finding, here is what the field believed before it, here is what the field does differently now.
Use the twelve-paper limit as a signal. A bibliography that lists twelve papers of visibly uneven weight suggests the nominator could not identify the important ones. Choose the papers that carry the argument in the letter, and let their number fall where it falls if that is fewer than twelve.
Write the 50-word citation first. If you cannot compress the case into a citation that would look right engraved next to a medal, the case is not yet clear enough to write three pages about. Drafting it first tends to sharpen the letter that follows.
Choose your two supporting letters for independence, not seniority. Since at most one may come from the nominee’s home institution, the second is doing real work: it should come from someone who competed with, built on, or independently verified the nominee’s results. A famous name who can only speak in generalities is worth less than a specific one who can say “we tried to reproduce this and it held.”
Check the cadence before you defer. The Gilbert Morgan Smith and J. Lawrence Smith medals run only every three years. If you skip 2027 because the nomination is not quite ready, the next opportunity is 2030.
Timeline
- 26 April 2026 — nomination period opened.
- 5 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. Eastern — nominations close. Age and date eligibility are evaluated as of this date.
- October–December 2026 — selection committees review.
- Mid-January 2027 — recipients announced.
Awards are presented at the NAS annual meeting following the announcement. The compressed review window between October and January is one reason late-submitted, hastily assembled nominations rarely do well: there is no opportunity to supplement the file after the deadline.
Common mistakes
Assuming you can apply. This is the single most frequent error. There is no application route. If you believe your own work merits one of these awards, the productive action is to make sure a qualified nominator outside your institution knows the cycle is open, knows which award fits, and has the material they would need — your CV, a suggested paper list, a draft citation. That is not improper; it is how nomination-based prizes function in practice.
Nominating your own former student. The mentee exclusion is explicit and will invalidate an otherwise strong file.
Nominating from inside the same institution. Also explicit, also fatal.
Missing an age or citizenship gate. The Molecular Biology award requires U.S. citizenship and an age cap of 50. Lounsbery requires American or French nationality and an age cap of 45. Food and Agriculture requires a U.S. institution and no more than 20 years post-PhD. Read the individual award page before investing in a letter.
Choosing the wrong award. Several awards overlap in field but differ sharply in what they reward. Scientific Discovery wants a recent basic-research breakthrough. The James Prize wants work that imported methods across disciplinary boundaries. Chemistry in Service to Society wants a demonstrated societal benefit and, in 2027, an industry-based chemist. A strong candidate submitted to the wrong prize competes badly against candidates who fit exactly.
Treating the Public Welfare Medal as a research award. It recognizes extraordinary use of science for the public good — science communication, public health leadership, education, advocacy. Past recipients include Francis S. Collins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Anthony Fauci, and Carl Sagan. Research excellence alone is not the criterion.
Frequently asked questions
Can non-U.S. scientists win? Yes for most awards. International nominees are welcome unless a specific award states otherwise. The exceptions are the awards that name a country in their terms: Molecular Biology (U.S. citizenship), Lounsbery (American or French), Food and Agriculture (U.S. institution), and Scientific Discovery (U.S. institution).
Do I need to be an NAS member to nominate? No.
Can I nominate more than one person across different awards? Nothing in the published guidance prohibits it. Each nomination is a separate submission with its own materials.
Is a nomination confidential? The Academy does not publish the nominee pool; only recipients are announced. Whether you tell your candidate is your decision, though most nominators do, since the CV and paper list are easier to assemble with the nominee’s help.
What happens to unsuccessful nominations? They do not carry over automatically. A candidate who was not selected can be nominated again in a later cycle, with a refreshed file.
Is there a nomination fee? None is stated in the Academy’s guidance.
Official links and next steps
Start with the Academy’s nomination guidance, which carries the authoritative rules on materials, conflicts, and deadlines:
- How to nominate: https://www.nasonline.org/awards/how-to-nominate/
- Awards currently open: https://www.nasonline.org/awards/currentawards/
- Nomination portal: https://awards-nasonline.secure-platform.com/a/organizations/main/home
Read the individual award page for the specific prize before drafting anything — each one carries its own eligibility text, and the differences between them are exactly where nominations are lost. With roughly ten weeks left before the 5 October deadline, there is enough time to line up two supporting letters and write a three-page case properly, and not much more than that.