Eight members of the MIT community — Hari Balakrishnan, Sangeeta Bhatia, Emery N. Brown, Anantha Chandrakasan, Eric D. Evans, Karen K. Gleason, L. Rafael Reif, and Daniela Rus — are among the 67 new members and 12 foreign associates elected today to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to American engineers. 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.”  

Elected this year:

• Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was cited for his contributions to wired and wireless networks and distributed systems;
• Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was cited for her work in tissue engineering and tissue-regeneration technologies, stem-cell differentiation, and preclinical drug evaluation;
• Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computational neuroscience, was cited for his work on the development of neural signal-processing algorithms for understanding memory encoding and modeling of brain states of anesthesia;
• Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was cited for his work on the development of low-power circuit and system design methods;
• Eric D. Evans, director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, was cited for the development of remote sensing systems, improvised explosive device (IED) detection, and ship antimissile defense;
• Karen K. Gleason, associate provost and the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, was cited for her invention, application development, scale-up, and commercialization of chemically vapor-deposited polymers;
• L. Rafael Reif, president of MIT, was cited for his technical and educational contributions, and for university leadership; and
• Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was cited for contributions to distributed robotic systems.  

“MIT’s contribution to this year’s cohort is remarkable,” says Ian A. Waitz, dean of the School of Engineering and the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “I’m deeply gratified to see the accomplishments of so many members of our engineering community acknowledged. The range, depth, and scale of the accomplishments of these individuals is amazing.”

Including this year’s inductees, 131 current faculty and staff from MIT are members of the National Academy of Engineering. With this week’s announcement, NAE’s total U.S. membership stands at 2,263; the number of foreign associates is at 221.   

At least 14 MIT alumni were also named to the NAE this year, including Harry A. Atwater Jr. ’81, PhD ’87; Wesley G. Bush ’83, SM ’83; Jonathan P. Caulkins PhD ’90; Janet G. Hering PhD ’88; Thomas M. Jahns ’73, PhD ’78; John Klier ’84; Philip L-F Liu PhD ’74; Samir S. Mitragotri PhD ’96; Radia J. Perlman ’73, PhD ’88; Ghavam Shahidi ’81, PhD ’89; Doros N. Theodorou PhD ’85; Harry L. Van Trees Jr. ScD ’61; and Eric Franklin Wood ’73, ScD ’74.