The National Academy of Sciences announced today that it will present its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal, to AAPSS Fellow and former AAPSS president Kathleen Hall Jamieson at an April ceremony. The award was established in 1914 and is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of 
science for the public good. In the NAS announcement, Jamieson was lauded for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues.”
Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the Walter and Leonore Director (and founder) of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands. She is the co-founder of FactCheck.org and its subsidiary site, SciCheck, and director of The Sunnylands Constitution Project, which has produced more than 30 award-winning films on the Constitution for high school students.
Jamieson has authored or co-authored 16 books, most recently Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President (Oxford University Press 2018), which won the 2019 R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers. Including Cyberwar, six of the books that Jamieson has authored or co-authored have received a total of nine political science or communication book awards (Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism, Presidents Creating the Presidency, and The Obama Victory.) She recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication and The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication.
“Throughout her long and exemplary career, Kathleen Hall Jamieson has worked tirelessly to bring science, evidence, and facts to the forefront of our public and political spheres,” said Susan Wessler, home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the selection committee for the award. “Her work is strengthening the foundation of an important cornerstone of our democracy—an informed citizenry that is better able to discern fact from fiction.”
