CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Two University of Illinois researchers — Karl Hess and Thomas S. Huang — have been elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering.
Hess and Huang were among 74 engineers selected for membership in the NAE, which was established in 1964 under a charter from the National Academy of Sciences as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers.
Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions in engineering. The current NAE membership includes 2,061 U.S. engineers and 154 foreign associates.
Hess, a Swanlund Professor of electrical and computer engineering and a researcher at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, was cited for his contributions to hot electron transport and the numerical simulation of semiconductor devices.
Hess is an internationally recognized researcher in the areas of solid-state electronics, the physics and chemistry of molecular and electronic nanostructures, and theory and simulation of optoelectronics. He also is one of the founders of the new area of computational electronics. Hess joined the UI faculty in 1978.
Huang, the William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering and a researcher at the university’s Coordinated Science Laboratory and at the Beckman Institute, was cited for his contributions to the theory and practice of image compression, retrieval and analysis.
Huang is an expert in image processing, computer vision and visual communication. His work involves enhancing visual images and extracting three-dimensional motion information from image sequences. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recently awarded Huang the 2001 Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal. Huang joined the UI faculty in 1980.
