CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - William D. Gropp has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Gropp is the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.
Gropp is among 68 new members and nine foreign associates announced by the academy on Feb. 17. Election to the NAE is one of the highest professional honors an engineer can garner. The 2,267 members and 196 foreign associates are an elite group distinguished by their outstanding contributions to the fields of technology and engineering.
Gropp was cited for his work in numerical software in the area of linear algebra and high-performance parallel and distributed computation. He wrote the book on the message passing interface (MPI) - several books, in fact - and has been instrumental in developing the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), one of the leading packages for scientific computing on highly parallel computers, among numerous other advanced computing projects.
"This is a significant recognition and prestigious honor for one of our distinguished faculty," said Ilesanmi Adesida, the dean of the College of Engineering and NAE member. "This is yet another indication of the impact our college and this university has on the world. It is further testament to the excellence to which we continue to aspire."
Gropp earned his master's degree in physics from the University of Washington in 1978 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1982. He joined the University of Illinois in 2007. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.