US: Two Nigerian-Americans elected into Academy of Engineering

TWO Nigerian-Americans, Oyekunle Olukotun and Oluwole Soboyejo, have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in the United States.

According to a statement from the academy, Olukotun and Soboyejo were amongst the 104 members and 24 international members elected to the academy this month.

With this development, the number of the academy’s total US membership rose to 2,353 while that of international members became 299.

According to the information on the academy’s website, its membership honours 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”.

The newly-elected class will be formally inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting on October 3, 2021.

According to his biography available online, Olukotun is the Cadence Design Systems Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and he 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.

Olukotun 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 Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.

Also, Oluwole Soboyejo, is Senior Vice-President and Provost, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Northborough.

Prior to joining 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 nanoparticles for the detection and treatment of disease, 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 Institution, amongst others.

He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Metallurgy from Churchill College, Cambridge University.