Havana, Cuba.-US biologist and academic Peter Agre, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003, joined the corresponding member list of the Cuban Academy of Sciences (ACC), local media reported today.

Approved by its Cuban colleagues in the most recent plenary session of the institution, the category is only possessed by experts who are not resident in the national territory and who have made a significant contribution to scientific development.

With his inclusion, this institution currently has 29 academics from 19 countries, Sergio Jorge Pastrana, general director of the ACC, told the press.

Born in 1949 in Minnesota, United States, Agre is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of his country and of the counterpart Russian center.

He is currently director of the Malaria Research Institute at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

His Nobel Prize was awarded alongside Roderick MacKinnon for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes.

Agre now integrates the team with colleagues from Argentina, Germany, Colombia, Spain, Jamaica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Russia, the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic of China.

Dr. Mark Rasenick, distinguished professor of Physiology, Biophysics and Psychiatry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, United States, joined the group in 2016.