“Anticorruption: How to Beat Back Political & Corporate Graft” explores the nature of modern global corruption – and how to defeat it. Highlighting examples from the United States, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Singapore, the authors in this issue – including both academics and law-makers – offer innovative, strategic, and practical recommendations to target public and private corruption.

Ruth Lehmann and Gertrud M. Schüpbach have been awarded the 2020 Francis Amory Prize in Reproductive Medicine and Reproductive Physiology by the Academy. The discoveries made by Lehmann, a cell biologist, and Schüpbach, a geneticist, have advanced their own fields and contributed to knowledge and progress in DNA repair, embryonic development, RNA regulation, stem cell research, and other areas.

A list of governance and committees.

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies to address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences and TIAA Institute today released three videos focused on the national priorities set forth by the Academy’s Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education: quality, completion, and affordability.

The ASTC blog dives into the final report from the Public Face of Science initiative on Priorities for the Future, offering an overview and several important takeaways.

To thwart the skepticism of prospective students, some map job options, offer guarantees.

College graduates – regardless of their major – earn considerably more than those without college degrees, and they are highly likely to be satisfied with their jobs and their lives. These are among the key takeaways from a new report, State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce & Beyond, from the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project. The report gathered and analyzed data on a variety of outcome measures, including perceived well-being, earnings, and financial and occupational satisfaction.

This essay by Chris Mooney cogently distills off-the-record workshops for experts from the scientific community and representatives of the public to explore how scientists currently understand their obligation to the broader social and cultural contexts in which their work is received, and to examine ways to improve engagement between the scientific and public communities.

New Data Available on College and University Humanities Departments

A dinner discussion on DNA and Art: In Search of the Genome of Leonardo da Vinci, featuring Jesse H. Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University and introductory remarks from Kenneth Wallach (Central National Gottesman Inc.) who cochairs the New York Program Committee.

An article by Martha Nussbaum

Cultural institutions across the United States—regardless of type or size—are facing unprecedented uncertainty, which is challenging long-standing models for communicating the value of arts and culture, for supporting these institutions, and for collaborating across the sector. To help address this uncertainty, the Academy held three virtual roundtable discussions in the fall of 2025 that brought together leaders from the arts and culture sector to reflect on these challenges and begin to outline strategies to move forward. To encourage open and candid dialogue, the discussions were held under the Chatham House Rule, so neither participants nor their comments can be identified in any materials related to the roundtables.

Global challenges, like the COVID-19 pandemic, underscore the value of international coordination and collaboration. In the case of pandemics, this need comes into play not only in managing and mitigating the spread of the disease, but also in the development of treatment therapies and vaccines. Indeed, the first COVID-19 vaccine approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration in December 2020 arose from an international collaboration between U.S. and German-based biotech companies, each led by immigrants from Greece and Turkey, respectively.

A Reuters article about the publication "The Case for Supreme Court Term Limits" - issued by the Academy's bipartisan working group - quotes Professor Akhil Amar and Judge Patti Saris, and cites U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Wood and Professor Charles Fried, all of whom are members of the working group and the Academy.

In a daylong symposium, the American Academy's Commission on the Arts explored the integration of arts, humanities, and STEM in higher education.

The Academy’s strategic priorities include improving the impact of the Academy’s work and raising the visibility of the institution with external audiences. These audiences vary and have included policymakers at the federal, state, and local level; leaders in philanthropy, higher education, nonprofit organizations, and business; scholars and students; advocacy groups; professional groups and practitioners; and the public.

Representatives of the Initiative for Humanities and Culture's two major components—the Research Program and the Humanities Indicators Program—came together to refine and elaborate on their future plans and to learn about each other's progress.

Public Trust in Vaccines identifies priorities for future research that would elucidate how health care providers can best communicate with undecided parents about the individual and community benefits of childhood vaccinations.