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President
National Academy of Sciences
| Appointee | Marcia McNutt |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | National Academy of Sciences |
| Domain | Sciences |
| Start | 1 July 2016 |
| End | Currently in role |
| Notes | First woman President of the NAS in its 153-year history |
Institutional context
The National Academy of Sciences is a private, congressionally chartered organisation that advises the United States government on scientific and technical matters. It was established by an act of Congress signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The President of the NAS is the senior officer of the institution. From 1863 through 2016 every NAS President was male — a span of 153 years.
Career path
Marcia Kemper McNutt (born 1952) earned a BA in physics from Colorado College and a PhD in earth sciences from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. She held faculty and research positions at MIT, served as President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (1997–2009), and was Director of the United States Geological Survey from 2009 to 2013 — the first woman in that role. She subsequently served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science from 2013 to 2016 — the first woman in that role.
Appointment
She was elected the 22nd President of the National Academy of Sciences and took office on 1 July 2016. She is the first woman to lead the NAS in its 153-year history.
Tenure
Active. Her current term is scheduled to conclude on 30 June 2026. Tenure has covered substantial expansion of the NAS's policy-advisory work on climate change, scientific integrity, gene-editing ethics, and pandemic preparedness; the institution's response to research-misconduct controversies; and a 2020 expansion of NAS bylaws permitting expulsion of members for harassment violations.
Cluster context
McNutt's 2016 appointment is one of three sequential first-woman events in McNutt's own career — USGS (2010, first woman director), Editor-in-Chief of Science (2013, first woman), NAS Presidency (2016, first woman). Three first-woman events at three different senior science-policy institutions, by a single individual, across six years. Her trajectory is among the dataset's clearest examples of repeated first-woman events at distinct institutional categories within a single career.