The U.S.

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

annually awards the Draper Prize, which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Engineering" — the others are the Academy's

Russ Russ is a masculine given name, often a short form of Russell, and also a surname. People Given name or nickname * Russ Abbot (born 1947), British musician, comedian and actor * Russ Adams (born 1980), American retired baseball player * Russ ...

and

Gordon Prize The Bernard M. Gordon Prize was started in 2001 by the United States National Academy of Engineering. Its purpose is to recognize leaders in academia for the development of new educational approaches to engineering. Each year, the Gordon Prize a ...

s. The Draper Prize is awarded biennially and the winner of each of these prizes receives $500,000. The Draper prize is named for

Charles Stark Draper Charles Stark "Doc" Draper (October 2, 1901 – July 25, 1987) was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentati ...

, the "father of

inertial navigation An inertial navigation system (INS) is a navigation device that uses motion sensors (accelerometers), rotation sensors ( gyroscopes) and a computer to continuously calculate by dead reckoning the position, the orientation, and the velocity (dir ...

", an

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

professor and founder of

Draper Laboratory Draper Laboratory is an American non-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc (sometimes abbreviated as CSDL). The laboratory specialize ...

Past winners

* 1989:

Jack S. Kilby Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part (along with Robert Noyce of Fairchild) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 195 ...

and

Robert N. Noyce Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited w ...

for their independent development of the monolithic

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

* 1991: Sir

Frank Whittle Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, (1 June 1907 – 8 August 1996) was an English engineer, inventor and Royal Air Force (RAF) air officer. He is credited with inventing the turbojet engine. A patent was submitted by Maxime Guillaume in 1921 for ...

and

Hans von Ohain Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain (14 December 191113 March 1998) was a German physicist, engineer, and the designer of the first operational jet engine. Together with Frank Whittle he is called the "father of the jet engine". His first test unit ran ...

for their independent development of the

turbojet engine The turbojet is an airbreathing jet engine which is typically used in aircraft. It consists of a gas turbine with a propelling nozzle. The gas turbine has an air inlet which includes inlet guide vanes, a compressor, a combustion chamber, and ...

* 1993:

John Backus John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Back ...

for his development of FORTRAN, the first widely used, general purpose, high-level computer language * 1995:

John R. Pierce John Robinson Pierce (March 27, 1910 – April 2, 2002), was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his ...

and Harold A. Rosen for their development of communication satellite technology * 1997:

Vladimir Haensel Vladimir Haensel (1 September 1914 – 15 December 2002) was an American chemical engineer who invented the platforming process - a ''plat''inum catalytic process for re''forming'' petroleum hydrocarbons into gasoline. In addition, he was influ ...

for his invention of " platforming" * 1999:

Charles K. Kao Sir Charles Kao Kuen Charles K. Kao was elected in 1990
as a memb ...

Robert D. Maurer Robert D. Maurer (born July 20, 1924) is an American industrial physicist noted for his leadership in the invention of optical fiber. In 1979, Maurer was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the technolog ...

, and John B. MacChesney for the development of

fiber optics An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to ...

* 2001:

Vinton G. Cerf Vinton may refer to: Places in the United States *Vinton, California * Fort Vinton, Florida *Vinton, Iowa * Vinton, Kansas * Vinton, Louisiana * Vinton, Missouri * Vinton, Nebraska, a ghost town in Valley County, Nebraska * Vinton Township, Nebrask ...

, Robert E. Kahn,

Leonard Kleinrock Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American computer scientist and a long-tenured professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. In the early 1960s, Kleinrock pioneered the application of queueing theory ...

, and Lawrence G. Roberts for the development of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

* 2002:

Robert Langer Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng (born August 29, 1948) is an American chemical engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, inventor and one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly the Germeshau ...

for the bioengineering of revolutionary medical

drug delivery Drug delivery refers to approaches, formulations, manufacturing techniques, storage systems, and technologies involved in transporting a pharmaceutical compound to its target site to achieve a desired therapeutic effect. Principles related to d ...

systems * 2003:

Ivan A. Getting Ivan Alexander Getting (January 18, 1912 – October 11, 2003) was an American physicist and electrical engineer, credited (along with Roger L. Easton and Bradford Parkinson) with the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS). He was ...

and Bradford W. Parkinson for their work developing the

Global Positioning System The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

* 2004:

Alan C. Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...

Butler W. Lampson Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the ...

, Robert W. Taylor, and

Charles P. Thacker Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker (February 26, 1943 – June 12, 2017) was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI). Biography Tha ...

for their work on

Alto The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian (Latin: ''altus''), historically refers to the contrapuntal part higher than the tenor and its associated vocal range. In 4-part voice leading alto is the second-highest part, sung in choruses by ...

, the first practical networked computer * 2005: , , ,

James W. Plummer James W. Plummer (January 29, 1920 – January 16, 2013) was an engineer who served as the fifth Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Plummer was the first Director NRO to come from the private industry. He previously served as the ...

, and for the design, development, and operation of

Corona Corona (from the Latin for 'crown') most commonly refers to: * Stellar corona, the outer atmosphere of the Sun or another star * Corona (beer), a Mexican beer * Corona, informal term for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the COVID-19 di ...

, the first space-based Earth observation systems * 2006:

Willard S. Boyle Willard Sterling Boyle, (August 19, 1924May 7, 2011) was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he h ...

and

George E. Smith George Elwood Smith (born May 10, 1930) is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device (CCD). He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semico ...

for the invention of the

charge-coupled device A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a ...

(CCD), a light-sensitive component at the heart of

digital camera A digital camera is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile device ...

s and other widely used imaging technologies * 2007:

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

for developing the World Wide Web * 2008:

Rudolf E. Kálmán Rudolf Emil Kálmán (May 19, 1930 – July 2, 2016) was a Hungarian Americans, Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical algo ...

for developing the

Kalman filter For statistics and control theory, Kalman filtering, also known as linear quadratic estimation (LQE), is an algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estimat ...

* 2009:

Robert H. Dennard Robert Heath Dennard (born September 5, 1932) is an American electrical engineer and inventor. Biography Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas, U.S. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, ...

for his invention and contributions to the development of

Dynamic Random Access Memory Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...

(DRAM), used universally in computers and other data processing and communication systems * 2011: Frances H. Arnold and Willem P.C. Stemmer for their individual contributions to

directed evolution Directed evolution (DE) is a method used in protein engineering that mimics the process of natural selection to steer proteins or nucleic acids toward a user-defined goal. It consists of subjecting a gene to iterative rounds of mutagenesis (cre ...

, a process which allows researchers to guide the creation of certain properties in proteins and cells. This technique has been used in food ingredients, pharmaceuticals,

toxicology Toxicology is a scientific discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms and the practice of diagnosing and treating expo ...

, agricultural products, gene delivery systems, laundry aids, and

biofuel Biofuel is a fuel that is produced over a short time span from biomass, rather than by the very slow natural processes involved in the formation of fossil fuels, such as oil. According to the United States Energy Information Administration (E ...

s * 2012: George H. Heilmeier,

Wolfgang Helfrich Wolfgang Helfrich (born 25 March 1932) is a German physicist and inventor recognized for his contributions to twisted-nematic liquid crystal technology, which is used to produce a variety of modern LCD electronic displays. Career Helfrich s ...

Martin Schadt Martin Schadt (born 1938) is a Swiss physicist and inventor. Biography In 1970, the physicists Martin Schadt and Wolfgang Helfrich invented the twisted nematic field effect (TN-effect) in the Central Research Laboratories of F. Hoffmann-La Roc ...

, and

T. Peter Brody T. P. "Peter" Brody (18 April 1920 Budapest, Hungary – 18 September 2011 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States) was a British-naturalised physicist and the co-inventor of Active Matrix Thin-Film Transistor display technology together with F ...

for their contributions to the development of

liquid crystal display A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat panel display, flat-panel display or other Electro-optic modulator, electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liqui ...

(LCD) technologies * 2013:

Thomas Haug Dr. Thomas Haug (born 1927 in Norway) is an electrical engineer known for developing the cellular telephone networks. Haug received a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Norway in Trondheim in 1951, and a deg ...

, Martin Cooper,

Yoshihisa Okumura Dr. Yoshihisa Okumura (born 1926, in Isikawa Prefecture) is a Japanese engineer, known for development of cellular telephone networks. His radio survey of signal strength as a function of distance as measured in drive tests in automobiles was cri ...

(奥村善久),

Richard H. Frenkiel Richard H. Frenkiel (born March 4, 1943 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American engineer, known for his significant role in the early development of cellular telephone networks. Professional career Frenkiel earned a bachelor's degree in mechani ...

, and Joel S. Engel –

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

pioneers who laid the groundwork for cellular telephone networks (GSM) and today's smartphone. * 2014:

John Goodenough John Bannister Goodenough ( ; born July 25, 1922) is an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He is a professor of Mechanical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering at the University ...

, (西美緒), Rachid Yazami and

Akira Yoshino is a Japanese chemist. He is a fellow of Asahi Kasei Corporation and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya. He created the first safe, production-viable lithium-ion battery which became used widely in cellular phones and notebook computers ...

(吉野彰) – rechargeable battery pioneers who laid the groundwork for today's lithium ion battery. * 2015:

Isamu Akasaki was a Japanese engineer and physicist, specializing in the field of semiconductor technology and Nobel Prize laureate, best known for inventing the bright gallium nitride ( GaN) p-n junction blue LED in 1989 and subsequently the high-brightness ...

M. George Craford M. George Craford (born December 29, 1938) is an American electrical engineer known for his work in Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). Raised in an Iowa farming community, he studied physics at the University of Iowa, where he earned his BA in 1961. ...

Russell Dupuis Russell Dean Dupuis (born 9 July 1947) is an American physicist. He holds the Steve W. Chaddick Endowed Chair in Electro-Optics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He has made pioneering contributions to metalor ...

, Nick Holonyak, Jr. and

Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese-born American electronic engineer and inventor specializing in the field of semiconductor technology, professor at the Materials Department of the College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and is rega ...

for the invention, development, and commercialization of materials and processes for light-emitting diodes (LEDs). * 2016:

Andrew J. Viterbi Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea Giacomo Viterbi, March 9, 1935) is an American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He is the Presidential Chair Professor of Electrical Engineeri ...

for development of the Viterbi algorithm, its transformational impact on digital wireless communications, and its significant applications in speech recognition and synthesis and in bioinformatics. * 2018:

Bjarne Stroustrup Bjarne Stroustrup (; ; born 30 December 1950) is a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the invention and development of the C++ programming language. As of July 2022, Stroustrup is a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. ...

for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language. * 2020:

Jean Fréchet Jean M.J. Fréchet (born August 1944) is a French-American chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his work on polymers including polymer-supported chemistry, chemically amplified photores ...

and C. Grant Willson for the invention, development, and commercialization of chemically amplified materials for micro- and nanofabrication, enabling the extreme miniaturization of microelectronic devices. * 2022: Steve B. Furber,

John L. Hennessy John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as t ...

, David A. Patterson and Sophie M. Wilson for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips. The NAE website shows that no Draper Prize was awarded in 2010, 2017, 2019 or 2021.Previous Recipients
/ref> Since the award is a biennial one, it was probably only given in even years beginning in 2016. The

Russ Prize The Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize is an American national and international award established by the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in October 1999 in Athens. Named after Fritz Russ, the founder of Systems Research Laborat ...

, also from the NAE, is awarded in odd years.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Draper Prize Draper Prize winners Awards of the United States National Academy of Engineering International awards

Past winners

See also

References