Three UC Berkeley professors named to NAE

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced today that three UC Berkeley faculty members — Arpad Horvath, Ravi Prasher and Ion Stoica — have been elected to its ranks. Their election brings the number of engineering faculty members in the NAE to 75.

Membership in the NAE is one of the highest professional honors for engineers. It’s also highly exclusive, with new initiates elected to the organization by current members. According to the NAE website, qualifications include “identifiable contributions or accomplishments in…engineering research, practice, or education.”

Horvath, L. E. Peirano professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is recognized for his research on the environmental life cycle assessment of infrastructure systems.

Prasher, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering, is honored for his development of thermal management technologies for microelectronics and the decarbonization of thermal energy systems. He also serves as the associate lab director of the Energy Technologies Area and as a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Stoica, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, is cited for developing networked systems for large-scale data processing, analytics and machine learning. Additionally, Stoica is the co-founder of Anyscale, Databricks and Conviva Networks. He also serves as the director at Sky Computing Lab.

This year’s roster of newly elected members also includes several Berkeley Engineering alumni:

• Glenn Bell (M.S.’75 CE), research civil engineer at the Materials and Structural Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

• Wonyong “Andy” Choi (B.S.’97 ME), director of the Institute for Environmental and Climate Technology and distinguished professor at the Korea Institute of Energy Technology.

• Juan Carlos De La Llera (M.S.’90, Ph.D.’94 CE), professor of structural and geotechnical engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

• Tejal Desai (Ph.D.’98 BioE), Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering at Brown University.

• James Gebhardt (M.S.’79, Ph.D.’83 MSE), a retired senior engineer at FLSmidth & Co.

• Ashraf Habibullah (M.S.’70 CE), founder, president and CEO of Computers and Structures, Inc.

• George Pappas (Ph.D.’98 EECS), UPS Foundation Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Jonathan Paul Stewart (B.S.’90, M.S.’92, Ph.D.’96 CE), professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA.

• Dawn Tilbury (M.S.’92, Ph.D.’94 EECS), professor of mechanical engineering and of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of Michigan, as well as head of the directorate for engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This announcement brings the total number of NAE members to 2,310 nationwide and 332 internationally. Inductees will be formally elected at the NAE annual meeting in September.