Two Nigerian-Americans, Oyekunle Olukotun and Oluwole Soboyejo, have made the nation proud as the duo got elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in the United States.
TOS News gathered that prerequisites for membership in the Academy are 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 two eggheads, Olukotun and Soboyejo were amongst the 104 members and 24 international members elected to the academy this month; this brings the total number of members to 2,353 and the number of international members to 299.
A press release by the Academy said newly elected members will be formally inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting on October 3, 2021.
Olutokun who bagged his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan is the Cadence Design Systems Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University since 1991.
He 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
Oluwole Soboyejo is Senior Vice-President and Provost, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Northborough.
Before joining WPI, he was a Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University for 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.
