The Rhode Island Alpha chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, inducted 26 new members at Brown University in a ceremony held Thursday, Nov. 21. Seventeen juniors were inducted along with nine seniors.
The 17 juniors elected were Arjun Bacigalupi ’26 (mechanical engineering), Kyanna Barros ’26 (biomedical engineering), Abigael Bousquet ’26 (computer engineering), Manuel Dal Bo ’26 (computer engineering), Veer Gokhale ’26 (electrical engineering), Madeline Goldsmith ’26 (electrical engineering), Brian Hwang ’26 (electrical engineering), Jacob Kolman ’26 (electrical engineering), Tej Maheshwari ’26 (chemical engineering), Daniel North ’26 (mechanical engineering), Luke Rossi ’26 (design engineering), Jared Sonkin ’26 (biomedical engineering), Kana Takizawa ’26 (computer engineering), Kailee Tanaka ’26 (biomedical engineering), Glenn Wang ’26 (electrical engineering), Trevor Wilkins ’26 (environmental engineering), and Lily Yu ’26 (biomedical engineering).
The nine seniors selected were Stella Chen ’25 (mechanical engineering), Matthew Fang ’25 (materials engineering), Neal Klemba ’25 (mechanical engineering), Alexander Lee ’25 (environmental engineering), Seo-Ho Lee ’25 (biomedical engineering), Wenyu Liu ’25 (engineering physics), Evan Ren ’25 (biomedical engineering), John Semple ’25 (biomedical engineering), and Serena Vu ’25 (mechanical engineering).
Tau Beta Pi, founded in 1885, is the second oldest Greek-letter honor society in America; the oldest is Phi Beta Kappa. While Phi Beta Kappa is restricted to students in the liberal arts, Tau Beta Pi is designed to “offer appropriate recognition for superior scholarship and exemplary character to students in engineering.”
In order to be inducted into the prestigious honor society, juniors must rank in the top eighth of their class and seniors must rank in the top fifth of their class. Tau Beta Pi is the world’s largest engineering society with more than 640,000 members and 257 collegiate chapters.
The Rhode Island Alpha chapter is an honor society for outstanding engineering students, and it also provides a vehicle for these students to assume a role of leadership at Brown and to be of distinctive service. Tau Beta Pi members are active in a variety of other engineering student organizations, and members also lead prospective engineering student tours of Barus and Holley and the Engineering Research Center.
Two of last year’s inductees, Alan Mach ’25 and Jason Pien ’25, were awarded scholarships from the national organization for their final year of undergraduate study.