George David Low, (Mechanical Engineering, B.S., 1980), was an astronaut of three space flights, logging more than 714 hours in space, including nearly six hours on a spacewalk. On his first flight into space, an 11-day mission aboard the space shuttle Columbia, Low carried with..Read More
Cornell graduate and Charles Stark Draper Prize winner Robert Langer (Chemical Engineering, B.S., 1970) developed a porous polymer drug delivery system to treat certain tumors. He also developed implantable microchips that could release drugs on command. In 1988, he discovered the use of polymer-based scaffolds..Read More
Richard W. Newman, (Mechanical Engineering, B.S., 1968) developed the first video endoscope. After a 40-year career designing medical diagnostic devices for Welch Allyn, Inc. Newman made significant contributions to the fields of flexible video endoscopy, glaucoma, and Alzheimer’s disease
Lester Eastman, (Electrical Engineering, Ph.D., 1957; M.S., 1955; B.S., 1953) contributed to the pioneering advances in communications technology resulting from the development of high-speed and high-frequency gallium arsenide devices. His research now permeates cell phone technology and radar and satellite communication applications
Jim S. Thorp (Ph.D., 1962; M.S., 1961; B.S., 1959, electrical engineering) co-invented (with Arun Phadke of Virginia Tech) the phasor measurement unit (PMU) for which he was elected to the National Association of Engineering and won the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Enginering (also won..Read More
F.C. Moon has made contributions to the field of nonlinear and chaotic dynamics of mechanical systems. He was one of the first in his field to develop new experimental tools of analysis in nonlinear vibrations based on Poincare maps and fractal measures of chaos. His..Read More
In 1974, Jack Blakely, professor, and his students in Materials Science and Engineering were the first in the world to synthesize a single layer of graphene (a very thin, nearly transparent sheet, one atom thick) and determine its structure. The method they developed is the..Read More
Edward W. Hart, a faculty member of both Materials Science and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from 1975 to 1988, developed “Hart’s Equations,” which were the first to incorporate time dependence into the analysis of deformation processes in a materials-specific way. His formulation is still the..Read More
Professor Christine Shoemaker initiated and led the United National Environment Program/Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment. The group focuses on groundwater contamination in development. She was also one of the first women engineering department chairs at an American university. Here, she is pictured in..Read More
Unix pipelines and software componentry were developed by Douglas McIlroy (Applied and Engineering Physics, B.S., 1954). His pioneering work in component-based software engineering was developed when he was head of the research department at Bell Laboratories. His seminal work on software componentization makes him a..Read More