NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Members and foreign associates are elected annually in recognition of their distinguished achievements in original research; election is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer. Currently, as many as 72 members and 18 foreign associates may be elected annually. Learn more >>
Viterbi School Faculty who are elected members of the National Academy of Sciences:
Leonard M. Adleman
Dr. Adleman co-invented the RSA public key crypto-system and has worked on primacy testing algorithms. His 1992 paper in Science, demonstrating that DNA can be used as a computing medium, introduced the field of molecular computing, which he has subsequently developed. Adleman and collaborators received the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award for their RSA innovations. Adleman is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the AAAS.
Solomon W. Golomb
Dr. Golomb is a specialist in communications theory whose work on shift register sequences, both their basic mathematics and their electronic applications, has become a key tool in applications ranging from radar to cellular telephones. He is an internationally known expert and inventor of mathematical games and puzzles, and a winner of the Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Among his other awards and honors, Golomb is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Elected 2003.
Robert W. Hellwarth
Dr. Hellwarth is a pioneering contributor to the understanding of quantum electronics and the inventor of novel laser devices. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received the L. A. Hyland Patent Award, the Charles Hard Townes Award of the Optical Society of America and the Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE.
George Olah
Dr. Olah, the 1994 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, is an innovator in the development of chemical technologies for environmentally favored and carbon-neutral energy conversion. He is a Distinguished University Professor, holds the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Chair in Organic Chemistry, and is Director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Simon Ramo
Dr. Ramo is a world-famous engineer and industrial leader. The “R” in TRW, a company Ramo co-founded, he formerly served as the chief scientist for the United States ICBM program, leading it to its development as a defense bulwark and a critical element of the U.S effort in space. Prior to that, he was a pioneer in the research of microwaves and the developer of General Electric’s electron microscope. Ramo was awarded the National Medal of Science and is a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Andrew J. Viterbi
Dr. Viterbi is creator of the Viterbi Algorithm, co-developer of CDMA cell phone technology and co-founder of Qualcomm. Viterbi is a recipient of the National Medal of Science, the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award, the Marconi Foundation Award, the Christopher Columbus Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal and many others. Dr. Viterbi is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the AAAS, and a 2008 Laureate of the Millenium Technology Prize Foundation of Finland.
Michael S. Waterman
Dr. Waterman is a pioneer in the area of computational biology, creating and applying mathematics, statistics and computer science to molecular biology - to DNA, RNA and protein sequence data. He co-developed the Smith-Waterman algorithm for sequence comparison and the Lander-Waterman formula for physical mapping. He is a founding editor of Journal of Computational Biology and is co-author of the texts Computational Genome Analysis: An Introduction, and Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes. Among his numerous awards, Waterman became the first Fellow of Celera Genomics. He is also a Fellow of the AAAS and of the IMS, and winner of the Gairdner International Foundation Award. Elected 2001.
