The leadership of US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected two Nigerian-Americans, Messrs Oyekunle Olukotun and Oluwole Soboyejo to the class of 2021.
Both Nigerian-Americans will be formally inducted alongside others during the NAE’s annual meeting on October 3, 2021
The new members bring the academy’s total US membership to 2,353 and the number of international members to 299.
Olukotun and Soboyejo were among the 104 US members and 24 international members elected into the academy this month, according to a statement by the NAE.
The academy honours with its membership those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”
Olukotun is a Cadence Design Systems Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and has been on the faculty since 1991.
Olukotun is well known as a pioneer in multicore processor design and the leader of the Stanford hydra chip multiprocessor research project.
He currently directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab, which seeks to proliferate the use of heterogeneous parallelism in all application areas using domain specific languages.
He received his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.
Soboyejo is Senior Vice-President and Provost, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Northborough.
Prior to joining the WPI, Soboyejo was a Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University for approximately 17 years.
He is a materials scientist, whose research focuses on biomaterials and the use of nano particles for the detection and treatment of diseases, the mechanical properties of materials, and the use of materials science to promote global development.
He has also served as President and Provost of the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, a Pan-African university founded by the Nelson Mandela Institutions, among others.
He bagged his PhD in Materials Science and Metallurgy from the Churchill College, Cambridge University.
