Berkeley Lab’s Kristin Persson Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Kristin Persson, a Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley and faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The prestigious organization honors excellence in science, the humanities and arts, and policy and communication. The Academy, which elected its first members in 1781, recently announced a new cohort of 252 members for 2026.

Persson’s work uses high-performance computing to study the physics and chemistry of materials. She is the founder and director of the Materials Project, an open-access database with millions of properties on hundreds of thousands of crystalline structures and molecules. The Materials Project is the most widely used repository of information on inorganic materials in the world, used by hundreds of thousands of people and vital for developing new materials for high-performance batteries, fuel cells, and data storage. The Materials Project’s curated datasets enable AI-powered materials design for faster scientific discoveries.

Persson also served as the director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Berkeley Lab, from 2020 to 2024. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineers and Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow; and fellow of the Materials Research Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Physical Society.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.