2/10/2022 Diana Yates, News Bureau
From left, chemical and biomolecular engineering professor William Hammack, civil and environmental engineering professor Youssef Hashash and computer science professor Klara Nahrstedt are newly elected members of the National Academy of Engineering.
Written by Diana Yates, News Bureau
Three University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
The new members are William Hammack, the William H. and Janet G. Lycan Professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering; Youssef Hashash, the William J. and Elaine F. Hall Endowed Professor and John Burkitt Webb Endowed Faculty Scholar in civil and environmental engineering; and Klara Nahrstedt, the Grainger Distinguished Chair of Engineering in computer science and the director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the U. of I.
In addition to Hammack, alumnus Robert Madix (BS ’61) and longtime former faculty member Nikolaos Sahinidis were also elected to the NAE—one of the highest honors in the field.
They are among 111 new members and 22 international members elected to the academy this year. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,388 and the number of international members to 310. According to the NAE, “Academy membership honors 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.”
Madix is the senior research fellow at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. He was selected for the development of quantitative models for predicting catalytic selectivity through the fundamental understanding of reaction mechanism and kinetics.
Sahinidis is the Gary C. Butler Family Chair and Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Between 1991 and 2007, he served on the faculty at the UIUC, initially as a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and later as a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. In 2007, he moved to Carnegie Mellon University. He was selected for contributions to global optimization and the development of widely used software for optimization and machine learning.
The new members will be formally inducted Oct. 2 during the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
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