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05/06/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 05/06/2026 13:23

Three UC San Diego Professors Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Published Date

May 06, 2026

Article Content

The National Academy of Sciences elected three faculty from the University of California San Diego to membership, one of the most prestigious honors awarded to American scientists and engineers.

Arshad Desai from the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, George Fuller from the Department of Physics, and Shang-Ping Xie from Scripps Institution of Oceanography join 120 members and 25 international members "in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research."

Desai, Fuller and Xie join more than 100 living and deceased members of the UC San Diego faculty who previously had been named to membership in the academy, a private, non-profit institution established by Congress in 1863 to provide science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

"UC San Diego is a place where scientific discovery is translated into real-world benefit to protect communities, improve health and advance understanding of our world," said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. "This recognition from the National Academy of Sciences is a well-deserved acknowledgement of our professors' achievements and the significance of their discoveries, as well as the impact of their innovative research on climate change, astrophysics, human health and longevity."

Arshad Desai, Professor and Chair, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology; and Professor, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine

Arshad Desai has long been fascinated by the extraordinary accuracy of chromosome segregation, the process in which chromosomes are separated during cell division to ensure each new cell has the correct number. Failures in this process underly conditions such as cancer, infertility and developmental disorders. Key contributions from Desai's group include defining the hierarchical assembly of molecular machinery on the centromeric region of chromosomes that forms dynamically coupled attachments to spindle microtubules, identifying a conserved protein family involved in assembly of specialized centromeric chromatin, elucidating control mechanisms that coordinate chromosome segregation with cell cycle progression and protect against segregation errors and discovering new functions of the chromosome segregation machinery in embryogenesis. He also has collaboratively engaged in understanding the role of centrosomes in spindle assembly, the therapeutic potential of targeting centrosomes in specific cancers and the mechanism of a mitotic duration sensor that acts as a tumor suppressor by preventing proliferation of cells exhibiting prolonged mitosis. Desai received his bachelor's degree from California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) and then pursued a PhD in cell biology at UC San Francisco. He conducted postdoctoral work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute in Dresden. He joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2002.

George Fuller, Distinguished Professor of Physics, Department of Physics

George Fuller's research interests are in theoretical nuclear and elementary particle physics and astrophysics, gravitation and cosmology. This work typically involves his students and postdocs and revolves around neutrino physics, dark matter and the early universe, gravitational collapse and the origin of black holes. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology. Before coming to UC San Diego in 1988, he was the Robert R. McCormick Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, and held positions at Lick Observatory-UC Santa Cruz, the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington, and at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is now a Distinguished Professor in UC San Diego's Department of Physics, and was the director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences here from 2007 to 2024. He is a co-principal investigator on the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries NSF Physics Frontier Center. Fuller is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and, in 2013, received APS's Hans A. Bethe Prize.

Shang-Ping Xie, Professor of Climate Sciences and Roger Revelle Chair in Environmental Science

Shang-Ping Xie's research centers on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their role in climate variability, and change. Xie's research contributes to answering fundamental questions including what determines the spatio-temporal variations of climate, how preferred patterns of climate variability form, how predictable climate is, and how climate will change in the face of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. He carries out both diagnostic and modeling studies, using observations and numerical models of the ocean, atmosphere, and their coupled system. His work spans all three major oceans of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian, and monsoons of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Xie served as lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report published in 2013. He has received the Meteorological Society of Japan Medal, the National Science Foundation Special Creativity Award, and the Sverdrup Gold Medal for "fundamental contributions to understanding the coupled ocean-atmosphere feedback processes involved in climate variability and climate change." He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society, and has repeatedly ranked as a Highly Cited Researcher on the Web of Science.

To be elected, academy members may submit formal nominations, followed by an extensive vetting process that results in a final ballot at the Academy's annual meeting each year.

Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,705 and the total number of international members to 557. International members are members of the Academy with citizenship outside the United States.

Additional information about the academy and its members is available online at http://www.nasonline.org

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