George Karniadakis, Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor of Applied Mathematics and Engineering at Brown University, and Wook Hyun Kwon Ph.D. ’76, professor emeritus at Seoul National University in South Korea, have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). They are two of the 111 new members and 22 international members elected, which brings the total U.S. membership to 2,388 members and the number of international members to 310.
Karniadakis was elected in recognition of his contributions to engineering for “computational tools, from high-accuracy algorithms to machine learning, and applications to complex flows, stochastic processes, and microfluidics.”
Kwon was elected for “contributions to model-predictive and robust controls and their commercialization.”
“This is fantastic news and we are thrilled for both of them,” said Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering Larry Larson. “To have both a faculty member and an alumnus elected in one year is a tremendous accomplishment for Brown and the School of Engineering.”
Karniadakis received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He has been a recipient of the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering (2021), Computational Fluid Dynamics award (2007) and the J. Tinsley Oden Medal (2013) by the U.S. Association in Computational Mechanics. His h-index, a quantifier of an individual’s scientific research output, is 118, while his research has been cited over 62,000 times.
Kwon received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University in 1966 and 1972, respectively, and a Ph D. degree from Brown University in 1976. He has been with Seoul National University since 1977, and has been a professor emeritus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2008. He became a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK) in 1995, a Fellow of the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology (KAST) in 1996, a Fellow of IEEE in 1999, a Fellow of TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences for the Developing Countries) in 2001, and a Fellow of IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) in 2010. He received the Korean Academy of Science (KAS) Award in 1997, Brown University Engineering Alumni Medal (BEAM) in 2003, and the Korea Highest Scientist/Engineer Award from the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2007. He was designated in 2018 as a man of national merit for science and technology by the Korean Government.
Election to the National Academy of Engineering 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.”