The National Academy of Engineering in the United States has elected two Nigerian-Americans into office, recognising their achievements in engineering.

The NAE elected 104 U.S. members and 24 international members into the academy this month. They will be inducted on October 3, 2021.

The latest NAE elections brought the total U.S. membership of the academy to 2,353 and 299 international members. Oyekun Olutokun and Oluwoye Soboyejo were among the newly-elected members.

John L. Anderson, the NAE President, announced this in Washington.

According to a statement by the academy, the NAE membership honours those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature.” 

It also includes “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.” 

Mr Olukotun is a Cadence Design Systems professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and has been on the faculty since 1991.

He is a pioneer in multicore processor design and the Stanford hydra chip multiprocessor research project’s leader.

With a doctorate in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, he currently directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab, which seeks to proliferate the use of heterogeneous parallelism in all application areas using domain-specific languages.

Mr Soboyejo, Senior Vice President and Provost, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Northborough, was a professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University for 17 years.

With a master’s degree in history and a PhD in Materials Science and Metallurgy from Churchill College, Cambridge University, he is a materials scientist with several years of experience.

He once 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.