In a shining example of the rapid strides being made by Indians in the spheres of science and technology and allied fields, nine outstanding scientists and engineers of Indian origin have been elected this year to the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and National Academy of Sciences (NAS), according to the information available on Web sites of NAE and NAS.

These engineers and scientists join the list of luminaries such as Nobel laureates Hargobind Khurana and Subramanyam Chandrasekhar, who were also elected to the elite academies.

The NAE elected 77 new members and nine foreign associates this year. Currently, the academy’s total U.S. membership stands at 2,138 and the number of foreign associates, 165.

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made “important contributions to engineering theory and practice, including significant contributions to the literature of engineering theory and practice,” and those who have demonstrated accomplishment in “the pioneering of new fields of engineering, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Indian Americans Anjan Bose, Debasis Mitra, Sanjit K. Mitra and Vinod K. Sahney were among the new members, while Bindu N. Lohani and Raghunath A. Mashelkar were elected as foreign associates.

Bose is the dean of College of Engineering and Architecture, Washington State University, Pullman. He was elected to the NAE for the development of training simulators and computational tools for reliable power-system operation and for contributions to education and research on power systems.

The election of Debasis Mitra, vice president, Mathematical Sciences Research, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, N.J., was in recognition of his contributions to the modeling, analysis and design of communication networks.

Sanjit K. Mitra, professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, was elected to the NAE for his contributions to signal and image processing, for research supervision, and for writing pioneering textbooks, while Sahney, senior vice president of planning and strategic development, Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, was recognized for development and use of industrial and operational systems engineering to improve health care.

Two Indians figure in the list of foreign associates elected for outstanding work in their respective fields. Lohani, secretary of the Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines, was elected for the development of planning for integrated economic-cum-environmentally sustainable development through the protection of natural and social resources, while New Delhi-based Mashelkar, director general, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), found his name in the scroll of honor for outstanding engineering contributions and exceptional leadership and management of the Indian National Laboratories, and for providing advice to the Indian government. Two Indian Americans and a Bangalore-based professor were among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 11 countries elected by the NAS “in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

The NAS, which was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by former U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, is one of the elite institutions in the U.S. that is “dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare,” and its distinguished scroll comprises such famous figures as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates.

Two Indian Americans elected to the NAS were Praveen Chaudhari; director, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, and Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, McArthur professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

Among the foreign associates was Obaid Siddiqi, professor and director, National Center for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Bangalore.

Over the last few years, Indian scientists and engineers have come back into limelight after a considerable period.

In 1999, as many as five Indians were named to the academies list. They were Haren Gandhi of Ford, Aravind Joshi of University of Pennsylania, K.R. Sreenivasan of University of Maryland, Rangaswamy Srinivasan of U Tech and

Praveen Varaiya of University of California, Berkeley. Last year, Rakesh Agarwal of Process Synthesis, Subrata Chakravarthi of Offshore Structure Analysis and Subra Suresh of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were elected to the academies by dint of their extremely significant discoveries and achievements. In doing so, they joined a club of exceptional Indian-American scientists and engineers such as Amar Bose of Bose acoustics and speakers, former Bell Labs President Arun Netravali, C. Kumar Patel, also of Bell Labs, Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon and Tom Kailath of Stanford University in the academies list.