| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Paul B. MacCready | | | Institution: | AeroVironment, Inc. | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | Death Date: | August 28, 2007 | | | | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Debra Niemeier | | | Institution: | University of Maryland, College Park; University of California, Davis | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Debra Niemeier is Clark Distinguished Chair in Sustainability and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Maryland, College Park as well as Professor Emerita of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Davis. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1994. Her work history also includes stints at the Texas Department of Highways, the City of San Marcos, T.Y. Lin International, and, at University of California, Davis, the Caltrans Air Quality Project, the John Muir Institute on the Environment, and Sustainable Design Academy.
Deb Niemeier has done ground-breaking research in vehicle emissions, air quality, affordable housing, and infrastructure funding, spurring policy and regulatory change. She developed new methods to resolve vehicle emissions for better identification of environmental health disparities. Her work transformed federal guidance for public agencies by requiring that vulnerable populations be identified using her methods. Her research on the return to background pollutant concentrations at roadside edge resulted in a complete revision of current thinking about minimum acceptable distances from roadway edges for sensitive populations, motivating new international studies on air pollutant much further from roadway edges than was previously thought necessary. Through her Guggenheim Fellowship, she is establishing the first civil and environmental engineering pro bono clinic in which engineering students will collaborate with law students through legal aid and university law clinics to provide technical expertise to support disadvantaged communities.
She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2017) and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2014). She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2021. | |
| 23 | Name: | Mr. Kenneth H. Olsen | | | Institution: | Advanced Modular Solutions, Inc. | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | February 6, 2011 | | | | | | |
Kenneth Olsen was well known as the cofounder of Digital Equipment Corporation. Under his leadership, DEC produced the first small interactive computer, the PDP-1 in 1960, the first mass produced minicomputer, the PDP-8 in the late 1960's, and the popular 32-bit VAX computer line in 1977. The VAX immediately became the "workhorse" of the research community. Early in his career as a post World War II graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he developed basic circuits for driving the first magnetic core memories, for which he was recognized by induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Olsen served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the Computer Science and Engineering Board of the National Academy of Sciences. He received an M.S.E.E. from M.I.T. (1952) and was a member of the National Academy of Engineering; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Ken Olsen died February 6, 2011, at the age of 84. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Henry Petroski | | | Institution: | Duke University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He is a graduate of Manhattan College, having earned his B.M.E. degree in 1963, and of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics in 1968. Before joining the Duke faculty in 1980, he taught at the University of Texas, Austin and served on the professional staff of Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Petroski, who has been called "the poet laureate of technology," has written broadly on the topics of design, success and failure, and the history of engineering and technology. His books on these subjects, which are intended for professional engineers, students, and general readers alike, include To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, which in 1987 was adapted for a BBC-television documentary; Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering, which was named by the Association of American Publishers as the best general engineering book published in 1994; and Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design, which was based on his 2004 Louis Clark Vanuxem Lectures at Princeton University. His Engineers of Dreams is a history of American bridge building. He has also written on commonplace objects in The Pencil; The Evolution of Useful Things; The Book on the Bookshelf; Small Things Considered; and The Toothpick, and has published collections of essays on engineering subjects under the titles Remaking the World and Pushing the Limits. His memoir about delivering newspapers in the 1950s and about what predisposed him to become an engineer is entitled Paperboy. Since 1991, he has written the engineering column in the bimonthly magazine American Scientist, and he also writes a column on the engineering profession for ASEE Prism. He is a professional engineer licensed in Texas and a chartered engineer registered in Ireland. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. Among his other honors are the Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers, the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose history and heritage committee he now chairs. He holds honorary degrees from Clarkson University, Manhattan College, Trinity College (in Hartford, Conn.), and Valparaiso University, and has received distinguished engineering alumnus awards from Manhattan College and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is an honorary member of the Moles and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. John R. Pierce | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1910 | | | Death Date: | April 2, 2002 | | | | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Emanuel R. Piore | | | Institution: | IBM | | | Year Elected: | 1967 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1908 | | | Death Date: | May 9, 2000 | | | | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Simon Ramo | | | Institution: | TRW Inc.; University of Southern California | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | June 27, 2016 | | | | | | |
Simon Ramo is recognized as a statesman and executor of high technology. He co-founded two Fortune 500 companies, one of which (TRW) was an enormously successful defense electronics firm that designed the American intercontinental ballistic missiles. He provided technical advice and systems analysis to the first Air Force ballistic missile program which produced the Thor, Alas, and Titan missiles in a five to six-year time period. Dr. Ramo had advised presidents, Cabinet members and Congress on questions of defense and scientific policy and has published a dozen books on subjects ranging from technology to tennis. Born in Salt Lake City in 1913, he earned a Ph.D. magna cum laude from the California Institute of Technology in 1936. Prior to working in defense, he served as a research engineer at the General Electric Corporation, where he attained worldwide recognition as a pioneer in microwave technology and developed GE's electron microscope. By the end of World War II, he held 25 patents in electronics. Dr. Ramo served on the National Science Board. He was the recipient of a special citation of honor from the United States Air Force for his role as the leading civilian in the Air Force's ballistic missile program. He had also been awarded the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was inducted into the Business Hall of Fame, and his texts on science, engineering and management have been translated into many languages and are used in universities throughout the world. In January 2008 he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering as a presidential chair and professor of electrical engineering. He received his last patent, for a computer-based learning invention, at age 100. Simon Ramo died June 27, 2016, at age 103 at his home in Santa Monica, California. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum | | | Institution: | Rice University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1964 | | | | | | |
Guided by the belief that all of the world’s people deserve access to health innovation, Professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum’s research and teaching focus on developing low-cost, high-performance technology for low-resource settings. She is known for providing vulnerable populations in the developing world access to life-saving health technology, focusing on diseases and conditions that cause high morbidity and mortality, such as cervical and oral cancer, premature birth, and malaria. Professor Richards-Kortum’s work in appropriate point-of-care screening technologies has earned her induction into the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, National Inventors Hall of Fame, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Rebecca is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and a member of the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University. After receiving a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1985, she continued her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received an MS in Physics in 1987 and a PhD in Medical Physics in 1990. She joined the faculty in Bioengineering at Rice University in 2005 and served as Chair of Bioengineering from 2005-2008 and 2012-2014.
Dr. Richards-Kortum’s research group is developing miniature imaging systems to enable better screening for oral, esophageal, and cervical cancer and their precursors at the point-of-care. She led development of a novel high resolution microendoscope capable of real-time, subcellular imaging of epithelial tissue. Her team developed low-cost (<$2500), robust hardware platforms, including a tablet- and cell-phone based system. Together with colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine and the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, she has carried out clinical trials involving more than 1,000 patients, which show that the device has promise to improve early diagnosis of esophageal, oral, and cervical precancer. In a prospective, multi-center clinical trial carried out in the US and China, high resolution microendoscopy improved specificity for esophageal precancer from 29% to 79%, without reducing sensitivity. Clinical trials of over 15,000 patients in China, Brazil, and El Salvador are now underway.
Her group has integrated advances in nanotechnology and microfabrication to develop novel, low-cost sensors to detect infectious diseases at the point-of-care, including HIV, cryptosporidium, malaria, and Tuberculosis. Her group developed a low-cost sensor to detect hemoglobin concentration; the device reduced per test cost by more than 100-fold (less than US$0.01 per test) compared to standard care. She led development of novel nucleic acid tests to enable diagnosis of HIV in infants in low-resource settings, introducing the first integrated paper and plastic device for isothermal amplification of DNA.
Together with Maria Oden, Dr. Richards-Kortum led development and dissemination of low-cost, robust technologies to improve neonatal survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Her team developed a $160 bubble CPAP device to treat premature infants with respiratory distress; the device delivers the same flow and pressure as systems used in the US, at 30-fold cost reduction. Clinical evaluation showed that the device improved survival rates from 24% to 65%, mirroring the impact of CPAP when it was introduced in the US. The device has been implemented at all government hospitals in Malawi, and introduced in Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa. In 2014, CPAP was recognized by the UN as one of 10 innovations that can save the lives of women and children now. The team is now developing a comprehensive set of technologies to enable essential newborn care at district hospitals in Africa, with the goal to equip a district hospital serving a catchment area of 250,000 people for less than $10,000. In 2018 Dr. Richards-Kortum was named a U.S. science envoy by the State Department.
At Rice University, Dr. Richards-Kortum has established new educational programs in global health technologies. She founded the Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) program in which undergraduate students from multiple backgrounds learn to think beyond geographic and disciplinary boundaries to solve challenges in global health. In 2012, Science awarded BTB the Prize for Inquiry Based Instruction. In addition, the National Academy of Engineering recognized BTB with the Real-World Education Prize for successfully integrating real world experiences into undergraduate curriculum. BTB has also been recognized by ASEE with the Chester Carlson Award (2007) and with the IEEE Educational Activities Board Vice-President Recognition Award (2008).
Rebecca is married and has three sons, Alexander, Maxwell and Zachary and three daughters, Katie, Elizabeth, and Margaret. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Walter L. Robb | | | Institution: | Vantage Management, Inc. & General Electric | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1928 | | | Death Date: | March 23, 2020 | | | | | | |
Walter Robb received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois and went on to work for GE. Robb retired from General Electric as a Senior Vice President-Corporation Research and Development and became President of Vantage Management, Inc.
Robb was the recipient of many awards and honors, including the National Medal of Technology in 1993 for his leadership in developing the leading CT and MRI scanners. In addition, he was the author of numerous technical publications and the holder of twelve patents. He served on the board of many private companies and serves as a Director of Celgene, and Mechanical Technology. Walter Robb died March 23, 2020 in Schenectady, New York at the age of 91. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Claude E. Shannon | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1983 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1916 | | | Death Date: | February 24, 2001 | | | | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. John H. Sinfelt | | | Institution: | Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Co. | | | Year Elected: | 1994 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | May 28, 2011 | | | | | | |
A leading scientist in catalysis by metals, John H. Sinfelt was Senior Scientific Advisor Emeritus at Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Company at his death on May 28, 2011. He was affiliated with the company since 1954, the year he was awarded his Ph.D. by the University of Illinois. Credited with discovering that a combination of metals insoluble in the bulk is the ideal catalyst for making unleaded gasoline with minimal waste of off-gas, Dr. Sinfelt also found that these metals could form bimetallic clusters in sizes of 10-30 A on Al2O3 or SiO2 and established the first practical catalys from Pt-Ir. Dr. Sinfelt's contributions have been recognized with the National Medal of Science and awards from engineering, chemical and physical societies. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Cyril S. Smith | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1955 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 8/25/92 | | | | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Howard Alvin Stone | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Professor Howard Stone received the B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from UC Davis in 1982 and the PhD in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in 1988. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, in 1989 Howard joined the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he eventually became the Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics. In July 2009 Howard moved to Princeton University where he is Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Howard’s research interests are in fluid dynamics, especially as they arise in problems at the interface of engineering, biology, chemistry, and physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and is past Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the APS. He was the first recipient of the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Dynamics (2008). He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2009), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), and the National Academy of Sciences (2014). | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. David A. Tirrell | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
David A. Tirrell is the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair, and Provost at the California Institute of Technology. Tirrell was educated at MIT and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He joined the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University as an assistant professor in 1978, returned to Amherst in 1984, and served as Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UMass before moving to Caltech in 1998. He served as chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 1999 until 2009, and as Director of the Beckman Institute from 2011 until 2018. Tirrell’s research interests lie in macromolecular chemistry and in the use of non-canonical amino acids to engineer and probe protein behavior. His contributions to these fields have been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to all three branches (Sciences, Engineering and Medicine) of the U.S. National Academies. | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Sheila E. Widnall | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2000 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Sheila Widnall has been a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation and vice chair of its board, a consultant to the MacArthur Foundation, a director of the Aerospace Corporation, Draper Laboratories, ANSER Corporation and Chemical Fabrics Incorporated, a trustee of the Boston Museum of Science, and a member of the Council of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington. She was a member of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government and is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a director of the Atlantic Council. Dr. Widnall's research activities in fluid dynamics have included the following: boundary layer stability; unsteady hydrodynamic loads on fully wetted and supercavitating hydrofoils of finite span; unsteady lifting-surface theory; unsteady air forces on oscillating cylinders in subsonic and supersonic flow; unsteady leading-edge vortex separation from slender delta wings; tip-vortex aerodynamics; helicopter noise; aerodynamics of high-speed ground transportation vehicles; vortex stability; aircraft-wake studies; turbulence; and transition. Dr. Widnall earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and has taught there for over 40 years. From 1979-90 she directed the Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory and in 1986 was named Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics. She currently holds the title of Institute Professor at M.I.T. | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1969 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | 10/21/94 | | | | |
| 37 | Name: | Dr. Jacob Ziv | | | Institution: | Technion - Israel Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | | | | |
Jacob Ziv has made important theoretical and practical contributions to information theory. On the theoretical side, he developed techniques for estimating the capacity of various channels and showed the centrality of the Rate-distortion function. On the practical side, he (with A. Lempel) developed a compression algorithm for data compression which is widely used for efficient storage of large data bases. Jacob Ziv has also contributed to the well being of science in Israel both in his capacity as the Chair of the Planning and Grants Committee (which looks after the quality and funding of the Israeli universities), and as the president of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 1983 Dr. Ziv has been Technion Distinguished Professor and Herman Gross Professor of Communications at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He has an extensive technical knowledge and deep concern for the well being of science. | |
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