In 2023, Nader Engheta was the recipient of the following three awards and honors: 1) the 2023 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering from the Franklin Institute, 2) election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 3) the 2023 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award.
The Benjamin Franklin Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious international awards from the United States, starting in 1824 in honor of Benjamin Franklin. Some of the previous winners include Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Marie and Pierre Curie, Enrico Fermi, Alexander Graham Bell, and so on. Also, 122 of the previous laureates of the Franklin Medal went on to receive the Nobel Prize in later years. Engheta received this award “for transformative innovations in engineering novel materials that interact with electromagnetic waves in unprecedented ways, with broad applications in ultrafast computing and communication technologies.” For more details, please visit https://www.fi.edu/awards/class-of-2023.
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (https://www.amacad.org) is one of oldest societies in the United States. The first class of members, elected in 1781, included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. For new members elected in 2023, please visit https://www.amacad.org/new-members-2023.
The Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest award the California Institute of Technology bestows on its graduates, recognizing “a particular achievement of noteworthy value, a series of such achievements, or a career of noteworthy accomplishment.” Engheta was selected “for his pioneering advancements in optics, including optical nanocircuits and metamaterials, which have brought a new understanding to how light and materials interact at the nanoscale.”
Nader Engheta (engheta@seas.upenn.edu) is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with affiliations in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Bioengineering, and Materials Science and Engineering. He received his B.S degree from the University of Tehran, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech. His current research activities span a broad range of areas including optics, metamaterials, electrodynamics, microwaves, photonics, nano-optics, graphene photonics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, microwave and optical antennas, and physics and engineering of fields and waves.
He has received several awards for his research including the 2020 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics (UK), the 2020 Max Born Award from the OPTICA (formerly Optical Society), the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the 2018 IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, the 2022 Hermann Anton Haus Lecture at MIT, the 2015 SPIE Gold Medal, the 2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the 2017 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, the Canadian Academy of Engineering as an International Fellow, the Fellow of US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Award from DoD, the Wheatstone Lecture in King’s College London, the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award, 2006 Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is a Fellow of nine international scientific and technical organizations, i.e., IEEE, OPTICA, American Physical Society (APS), Materials Research Society (MRS), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), URSI, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Institute of Physics (IOP-UK) and US National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He has received the honorary doctoral degrees from the Aalto University in Finland in 2016, the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2016, and Ukraine’s National Technical University Kharkov Polytechnic Institute in 2017.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2023.3325609