National Academy of Sciences selects 2 local professors

Marc R. Montminy of the Salk Institute and Peter Shearer of Scripps Institution of Oceanography are among 72 newly elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious honorary society for scientists.

Also at the academy’s meeting, it was announced that Mario Molina, an SIO professor of chemistry and chemistry and biochemistry professor at UCSD, was one of 20 scientists and engineers recently named by President Obama to the president’s scientific advisory panel.

Montminy is a professor in the Salk’s Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology. His work focuses on “the complex network of brain signals, hormones, and physiological mechanisms that modulate the body’s energy balance and set the stage for metabolic disease,” a news release states.

Shearer, a professor at Scripps of geophysics in the Scripps Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, is a leader in developing new methods to improve our understanding of earthquakes in California and around the world, a Scripps news release states.

Molina joins David E. Shaw, chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research and a 1972 UCSD alumnus on the President’s Council on Science and Technology, which will advise Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on a range of issues pertaining to science, technology and innovation.