Faculty and alumni elected to National Academy of Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University’s Bill Sanders, Elias Towe, Anirudh Devgan, and Stefan Savage have received the prestigious honor of election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). have received the prestigious honor of election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors 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.”

Bill Sanders, dean of the College of Engineering, is a leader in engineering research and academia and a well-respected collaborator in higher education. Before coming to CMU in January 2020, he spent 25 years as a tenured professor at the University of Illinois in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests include secure and dependable computing and security, as well as resiliency metrics and evaluation, with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has published more than 300 technical papers in those areas.

Elias Towe, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and engineering. He received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was also a Vinton Hayes Fellow. Prior to joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in 2001, he was, at the same time, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. His research is in basic optical and quantum phenomena in materials for applications in novel photonic devices that enable a new generation of information processing systems for communication, computation, and sensing.

Anirudh Devgan (ECE ’91, ’93) is the president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors. Devgan joined Cadence in 2012 and held several leadership positions at the company before becoming CEO in 2021. Devgan is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities in electronic design automation (EDA). He successfully pioneered the application of massively parallel and distributed architectures to create several industry firsts and most impactful products in the areas of SPICE simulation, library characterization, place and route, static timing, power and electromagnetics, among several others. He also drove the first common compiler architecture for emulation and prototyping platforms.

Stefan Savage is a cybersecurity expert who received his undergraduate degree in applied history from the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1991. Savage is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. In 2017, Savage was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often known as a “genius grant.” Savage and colleagues were the first to demonstrate the ability to hack an automobile remotely. He and collaborators also have identified a critical bottleneck for spam email campaigns and online counterfeit goods transactions. His research interests lie at the intersection of distributed systems, networking and computer security, with a current focus on embedded security and the economics of cybercrime.

Two former members of the Carnegie Mellon community were also elected to the NAE.

Jennifer Sinclair Curtis, a former associate professor of chemical engineering at CMU who currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering (and former Dean of Engineering) at the University of California, Davis; and Xuedong D. Huang, a former research computer scientist at CMU who is currently the Technical Fellow and Chief Technology Officer of Azure AI, were both among the NAE’s new members.

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting on October 1, 2023. According to the NAE, they join a select group of national and international senior professionals in business, academia, and government who have distinguished themselves through technical accomplishments and leadership. NAE members volunteer their time on initiatives that help guide the development of federal laws and regulations, improve the effectiveness of government programs, shape the direction of research fields, and inform public knowledge and dialogue about issues of critical importance.