Carol A. Carter, a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, has been named a 2025 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). This honor is regarded as the highest professional distinction given exclusively to academic inventors.
The NAI Fellows Program was created to recognize academic inventors who have shown significant innovation through inventions that positively impact quality of life, economic development, and societal welfare. The 2025 class consists of 169 U.S. Fellows from 127 universities, government agencies, and research institutions across 40 states. Collectively, this year’s class holds more than 5,300 U.S. patents and includes Nobel Prize recipients and members of other national academies.
Since its founding in 2012, the NAI Fellows program has recognized over 2,200 researchers whose inventions have led to more than 86,000 U.S. patents and 20,000 licensed technologies. These innovations are estimated to have generated $3.8 trillion in revenue and created approximately 1.4 million jobs.
Carter is widely known for her early contributions to HIV research. Her work on isolating recombinant forms of viral protease and capsid protein advanced understanding in virology. She also identified an interaction between HIV-1 and host protein Tsg101 necessary for viral particle budding from infected cells—a discovery that opened new areas in virology and cell biology research.
She has received multiple honors for her achievements including the David Derse Memorial Retrovirology Award, Long Island Innovator of the Year Award, Suffolk County NY Martin Luther King Jr. Commission Public Service Award, Stony Brook University Presidential Award for Promoting Diversity and Academic Excellence, recognition as a Pioneer in Molecular Biology by the Journal of Molecular Biology, and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.
“Dr. Carter is not only an inventor of great vision but also an exceptional educator, entrepreneur and mentor whose work radiates outward into society in profoundly meaningful ways,” said Iwao Ojima, president of the Stony Brook University Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. “She is precisely the kind of scholar-practitioner with exceptional achievements and future promise, who elevates the mission of the National Academy of Inventors.”
Carter will be formally inducted at the NAI’s annual meeting scheduled for June 1-4, 2026 in Los Angeles.
