Six Women Academics Elected Fellows of the National Academy of Engineering

Recently, the National Academy of Engineering announced its 2016 class of new fellows. According to WIAReport‘s analysis, only 12 of the 80 new members are women. Thus, women are just 15 percent of the new members.

The numbers are very similar to recent cohorts of new fellows to the National Academy of Engineering. A year ago, there were 11 women among 67 new members. In 2014 there were eight women among 67 new members. In 2013, five of the 69 new members were women. In 2012, there were seven women among the 66 new members elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Of this year’s 12 new women members of the National Academy of Engineering, six have current affiliations with the academic world.

(L to R) Zhenan Bao, Emily A. Carter, Fiona M. Doyle, Yilu Liu, Bridget R. Scanlon, and Jennifer L. West

Zhenan Bao is a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University in California. She is being honored for her work on organic semiconductors for flexible electronics. Dr. Bao holds 39 U.S. patents. Professor Bao joined the faculty at Stanford in 2004. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Emily A. Carter is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University in New Jersey. She joined the faculty at Princeton in 2004 after teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Carter is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.

Fiona M. Doyle is the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor of Mineral Engineering and dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Doyle, who has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1983, in being honored, in part, for her leadership in engineering education. Dr. Doyle earned bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in hydrometallurgy from the University of London.

Yilu Liu is the Governor’s Chair Professor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the University of Tennessee. She is being honored for her research on electric power grid monitoring. She taught at Virginia Tech before joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 2009. Dr. Liu holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Ohio State University.

Bridget R. Scanlon is a senior research scientist in the Sustainable Water Resources Program of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Scanlon joined the faculty at the University of Texas in 1999. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. Professor Scanlon earned a master’s degree at the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in geology at the University of Kentucky.

Jennifer L. West is the Fitzpatrick Family University Professor of Engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She also holds appointments in the departments of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering and materials science. Dr. West is being honored for work in bioabsorbed scaffolds for tissue regeneration. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas.