Recipients of the National Order of Scientific Merit (Brazil)

Mohammad Abdus Salam NI(M) SPk (29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996) was a Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physicist and a Nobel Prize laureate. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and the first from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize, after Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

Richard "Dick" McGee Morse, Ph.D. (June 26, 1922 – April 17, 2001) was a Latin Americanist scholar and professor at Columbia University, University of Puerto Rico, Yale University and Stanford University before finishing his career at the Wilson Center in Washington DC.

Johanna Liesbeth Kubelka Döbereiner (28 November 1924 – 5 October 2000) was a Brazilian agronomist.

Casimiro Montenegro Filho (29 October 1904—26 February 2000) was a Brazilian army and air force officer. He reached the rank of Marechal-do-ar, the highest rank of the Brazilian Air Force rank system.

José Márcio Ayres (1954—2003) was a Brazilian primatologist and conservationist who founded the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in 1996, followed by the Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve in 1998. The two reserves are located in the central region of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, and are joined by adjacent Jaú National Park to form a corridor spanning over 20,000 square miles (52,000 km2) of protected rainforest.

Dr. Ivan Antonio Izquierdo is a renowned Argentine Brazilian scientist and a pioneer in the study of the neurobiology of learning and memory. Born in 1937 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Izquierdo has graduated in Medicine (1961) and completed his Ph.D. in Pharmacology (1962), both in the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). For nearly a decade, Izquierdo taught at National University of Cordoba (UNC), in Argentina, but, due to a number of reasons, both political (the Argentinian dictatorship) and personal (his wife, Ivone, is Brazilian), he moved to Brazil in the beginning of the 1970s, and has lived in Porto Alegre since 1978. For more than 20 years, he has worked in the "Center of Memory" of the Biochemistry Department of the Health Basic Sciences Institute (ICBS) at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), where he has had an enormous influence on young scientists: he has trained 42 Ph.D. students, most of whom hold academic research positions in universities in Brazil and elsewhere. Recently, he moved to the Pontificial Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) where he continues with his research.

Crodowaldo Pavan (Portuguese pronunciation: December 1, 1919 – April 3, 2009) was a Brazilian biologist and geneticist, and a scientific leader in Brazil.

José Reis (June 12, 1907 – May 16, 2002) was a noted Brazilian scientist, journalist, scientific leader and science writer.

Wilson Teixeira Beraldo (April 20, 1917, Silvanópolis, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil – July 28, 1998, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais) was a Brazilian physician and physiologist, a co-discoverer of bradykinin.

Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes (11 July 1924 – 8 March 2005), also known as César Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.