Christopher Chang elected member of the National Academy of Sciences

Christopher Chang, the Edward and Virginia Taylor Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

The NAS 2026 cohort of 120 new members and 25 international members was announced last week and includes eight Princeton University professors.

Chang is being honored for his lab’s body of work investigating the chemistry and biology of the elements.

“I woke up to the exciting news with a bunch of text and email messages on my phone while on travel in Singapore serving on an external department review,” said Chang. “I’m proud of the creativity and hard work that the students in our lab have contributed throughout the years to our science and group culture, and I’m grateful to my many mentors for shaping my own educational experiences and to the community for recognizing us in this way.”

Chang’s research focuses on how metals on the periodic table impact energy science, sustainability, and our own biology. He seeks to advance concepts in sensing and catalysis by fusing approaches in chemistry, biology, and medicine.

For example, in recent years the group has initiated the field of activity-based sensing, which uses chemical reactivity as a way to create new sensors to map the elements of life; it has advanced the concept of transition metal signaling, where these dietary nutrients regulate new cell growth and death pathways in health and disease by metalloallostery, particularly in neuroscience and cancer; and it has developed nature-inspired catalysts for energy science and decarbonization technologies.

Chang joined the Princeton Department of Chemistry in July 2024 from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and was a Fulbright Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chang won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, the Humboldt Research Award in 2020, a Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry in 2015, and the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award in Graduate Education in 2013. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. Most recently Chang won the 2024 ACS Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry.

He is also the editor-in-chief of Accounts in Chemical Research and serves on editorial boards of various journals, including Chemical Science, Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, Aggregate, and the Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry.

“Science is for everyone, and curiosity-driven research and education is a long-term investment in people,” said Chang. “I’m born and raised in the United States as a child of immigrants who came here for an education. We have welcomed over 200 talented scientists from all over the world to train in our lab and I’ve taught several thousand more students in my classes over the past 20 years.

“An educated society is a prosperous society, as people are the ultimate products of an academic’s career. And the scientific advances that people make along the way positively impact society and are shared by and benefit all of us.”

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

The full NAS press release announcing the new members can be found here.