Three Faculty,
Three Alumni Elected to National Academy of
Engineering
Posted March 8, 2000
Three Berkeley professors -- leaders in high-performance computing systems, nuclear materials, and the development of materials for microlithography -- have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional honor for an American engineer.
New members from the College of Engineering faculty are Randy Katz, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, and Donald Olander, professor of nuclear engineering. Also elected was Jean M Fréchet, professor of chemistry. They are among 78 new members and eight foreign associates elected this year.
Katz is a Berkeley alumnus; in addition, three other Berkeley graduates were among those elected for induction later this year.
Their election brings the total Berkeley faculty membership to 79. Among academic institutions, Berkeley has one of the highest representations in the academy.
Katz, has worked at the forefront of computing throughout his career, in areas including computer architecture, Internet technology, and wireless communication. He was cited for "contributions to high-performance input/output systems, engineering education, and government service." He was noted particularly for his work on the RAID project, which used many PC disks to do the work once done by a few massive disks, gaining in computer performance, power, and adaptability.
Katz joined the faculty in 1983 and served as department chairman from 1996-99. He spent two years, 1993-94, in Washington, D.C., as deputy director of the Computer Systems Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Office, during which time he worked with the Clinton administration to bring the Internet to the White House.
Olander was honored by the academy for "research on nuclear materials, including nuclear fuel element behavior in power reactors." He has conducted studies of gas-solid reactions and written a widely used book on the behavior of nuclear reactor fuel elements. He has also investigated the performance of degraded nuclear fuels and developed models to analyze the chemistry and materials involved in severe nuclear accidents.
He earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 1958 and joined Berkeley's chemical engineering faculty that same year. He moved to nuclear engineering in 1961, where he served as chair from 1979-84. Olander is a fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and a special issue of the Journal of Nuclear Materials was recently published in his honor.
Fréchet, an authority in polymers and advanced engineering materials, came to the Berkeley faculty in 1996, after 14 years on the University of Ottowa faculty and 10 years on the Cornell faculty.
Fréchet has worked with IBM scientists on chemically amplified resists, which revolutionized microlithography. He was recognized for "contributions to the discovery, development, and engineering of new materials for microlithography and separation technologies."
In addition to Katz, one other College of Engineering alumnus was elected this year: Noel MacDonald, professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University.
Other Berkeley alumni elected are Frances Arnold, professor of chemical engineering, California Institute of Technology, and Octave Levenspiel, professor emeritus of chemical engineering, Oregon State University.
The new members will be inducted into the academy in October at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
March 8-12, 2000
(Volume 28, Number 24)
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