LSU External Awards & Recognition Program
Supporting Faculty Excellence Through National Recognition
The External Awards & Recognition Program provides LSU faculty and academic leadership with centralized strategic support to identify, apply for, and attain external awards at the national level. While all national awards are valued, LSU particularly encourages the pursuit of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards as identified by the National Research Council. In addition, the program showcases current recipients of all national/international external awards, including recipients of highly prestigious and prestigious pathway awards, to increase awareness of outstanding faculty accomplishments. Starting in 2024, the Provost is generously providing university stipends of $5,000 for prestigious pathway award recipients, and $10,000 for highly prestigious award recipients.
We want to hear about your involvement with all awards of national distinction! Please
submit all national-level award nominations and/or selections here.
Dr. Gabriela González signing into the National Academy of Sciences.
– Photo: National Academy of Sciences
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More than 200 LSU faculty have received awards and honors classified by the National Research Council as highly prestigious or prestigious.
LSU Chemistry Professor Les Butler has been named a 2024 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the fields of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and X-ray interferometry imaging.
John A. Pojman Sr., the William and Patricia Senn, Jr., Distinguished Professor and Chair of the LSU Department of Chemistry, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Fahui Wang, Cyril & Tutta Vetter Alumni Professor in the LSU Department of Geography & Anthropology, has been named as a 2025 Fellow for the American Association of Geographers.
Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Manas Ranjan Gartia has been elected a fellow to the National Academy of Inventors.
Funded research projects highlight the success of LSU's Scholarship First Agenda to advance foundational and applied science to improve lives.
The American Chemical Society, one of the world's largest scientific societies, has named Zakiya Wilson-Kennedy, Associate Dean for Academic Innovation & Engagement for the College of Science and Ron and Dr. Mary Neal Distinguished Associate Professor of Chemistry Education, a 2024 ACS Fellow.
Links for Faculty Members
External Awards
Highly Prestigious Awards
Highly prestigious awards, including induction into the National Academies, represent the pinnacle of recognition in academia. The National Research Council denotes the Highly Prestigious Award designation to more than 200 awards, honors, and recognitions across the arts and humanities, physical sciences and engineering, social sciences, and life sciences. In addition to bringing increased visibility and elevating opportunities for faculty recipients, these highly prestigious awards are noted by the AAU as a metric for institutional membership and are important in university rankings.
Prestigious Pathway Awards
Prestigious pathway awards include both early career awards for research (e.g., National Science Foundation CAREER Award) as well as career achievement awards (e.g., American Academy for the Advancement of Science Fellow). The prestigious awards in the following list are precedents or “pathways” to highly prestigious awards. We classify any award as a Pathway Award if at least 25% of highly prestigious award winners had previously received that award.
Additional External Awards
The complete LSU list of national awards is drawn from the Academic Analytics database, which provides one of the largest single sources of data on professional honors and awards in academia. The awards data are assembled through annual collection of data from individual governing societies. The general principle for the inclusion of an award in the database of over 20,000 awards is that the award must be open to all people in a discipline or to a large subset of people in that discipline at the national and/or international level.