Marilynn Brewer, professor emerita and Ohio Eminent Scholar in the Department of Psychology, and Christopher Kochanek, professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in the Department of Astronomy, have been selected as part of the 2026 class of the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership and provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Brewer's major interests include social cognition, which is the perception and cognitive representation of individual persons and person "types;" intergroup relations, especially the study of ingroup biases and the effects of contact between groups on intergroup acceptance; and social identities and the self-concept. She has served as editor of Personality and Social Psychology Review and as associate editor of Psychological Review and is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Election to the National Academy of Sciences is a tremendous, career-capping honor and I am very grateful to my colleagues in the academy for this recognition,” Brewer said. “As I see it, induction in NAS is not only an honor but also an obligation to contribute to the work of the academy to defend science and scientific methodology in the current adverse political climate. I look forward to this opportunity to advocate for the sciences in general, and on behalf of the social and behavioral sciences in particular.”

Kochanek’s work uses gravitational lensing as a tool to constrain the physics of dark energy, the dark matter profiles and substructures of galaxy halos, and the physics of quasar accretion disks. He has worked on a variety of topics including binary neutron star mergers, the mass of the Milky Way, the cosmic distance ladder and the luminosity functions of galaxies. He is particularly interested in time-domain astronomy, with recent works exploring the variability properties of massive stars and quasars, and the discovery of new types of supernovae.

Brewer and Kochanek join 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences, and a group of 2,705 active academy members overall.