Academician

In the arts, literature, engineering, and science, an academician is a full member of an academy in one of the fields. This honorific title is used to designate a full member of an academy who has a significant impact on the national scientific community in several nations. In institutions like the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, the title confers privileges as well as administrative duties for allocating funds and determining priority research areas for investigation.

Academician is a title that has historically been associated with the traditions of the two most successful early scientific societies: either the Royal Society, where it was an honorary recognition by an independent body of peer reviewers and was meant to distinguish a person while conferring relatively little formal power, or the French Academy of Sciences, which was much more closely integrated with the government, provided with more state funding as an organisation, and conferred significantly more formal power on its members.