News
2012
CNN, Ali Velshi Salutes Engineers
Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 Win Engineer's Draper Prize for Development of LCDs
Washington Examiner, Profile: Charles Vest
LCD Inventors Win Top Engineering Honor
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The inventors of the liquid crystal display (LCD), which has enabled devices including digital watches, smartphones, and high definition televisions, will be presented with engineering’s highest honor during a Feb. 21 ceremony in Washington.
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) will honor T. Peter Brody, George H. Heilmeier, Wolfgang Helfrich, and Martin Schadt with the 2012 Charles Stark Draper Prize, which annually recognizes engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society, and is considered the Nobel Prize of engineering. The prize includes a $500,000 award.
“The engineers we are honoring have created windows through which people are learning about and shaping our world,” said NAE President Charles M. Vest. “The LCD is the human interface with much of today’s technology and information.”
LCD screens are used by virtually everyone in the modern world on a daily basis, and are the medium through which people get information from a variety of everyday devices – including calculators, clocks, computer monitors, smart phones, and televisions.
2011
Draper Prize Winners Lecture at Caltech
Drs. Willem Stemmer and Frances Arnold, who won the Draper Prize in 2011 for their research on directed protein evolution, conducted the first Draper Prize lecture on the West Coast on Nov.9. The event was held in a packed lecture hall at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.
Directed Protein Evolution Researchers Receive Draper Prize
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The 2011 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the nation’s top engineering honor, has been awarded to Drs. Frances Arnold and Willem Stemmer for their pioneering contributions that enable researchers to guide the creation of desirable properties in proteins and cells. The prize, which includes a $500,000 award, honors engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society, and is considered the Nobel Prize of engineering.
The 2011 Draper Prize was awarded by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on Feb. 22 as part of the annual National Engineers Week celebration in Washington, D.C.
Directed evolution synthetically harnesses the power of natural selection to evolve proteins or RNA creating desirable properties not found in nature. Most directed evolution projects seek to evolve properties that are useful to humans for agriculture, medicine, or industry by optimizing characteristics not selected for in the original organism.
Arnold and Stemmer’s independent approaches to the development of directed protein evolution have helped find practical and cost effective ways to make a wide range of new and better products, including food ingredients, drugs, medical diagnostics, agricultural products, gene delivery systems, alternative energy, biofuels, and laundry aids. Their work has led to improvements in the field of medicine including better diagnostics for diseases and more powerful antibiotics and drugs to treat arthritis.
Further, their work in developing design principles for engineering complex biological systems is helping to elucidate why nature’s designs work the way they do.
Arnold and Stemmer’s work has contributed to the development of a number of more environmentally-friendly processes for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, chemicals and fuels.
Arnold, the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, has the distinction of having been elected to all three membership organizations of the National Academies -- the NAE in 2000, the Institute of Medicine in 2004, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.
Stemmer is the chief executive of Amunix, which develops drugs with an extended serum half-life, enabling less frequent injection.
The Charles Stark Draper Prize was established and endowed by Draper Laboratory in 1988 in tribute to its founder, Dr. Charles Stark Draper, who pioneered inertial navigation and led his research laboratory at MIT into the real world where development mattered as much as research and where hands-on engineering education was critical to the development of future engineers and for the achievements of his Laboratory. It is intended to honor those who have contributed to the advancement of engineering and to improve public understanding of the importance of engineering and technology.
USA Today: Engineering Prizes Awarded at D.C. Gala
La Cañada Valley Sun: Mother Nature is her lab partner
YouTube Videos:
Irwin Jacobs and Draper President Jim Shields introduce the 2011 Draper Prize winners
Dr. Frances Arnold accepts the 2011 Draper Prize
Dr. Willem Stemmer accepts the 2011 Draper Prize
National Public Radio covers the death of Williard Boyle, a Draper Prize winner who invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), which is used today in “everything from bar code scanners to medical endoscopes to the Hubble Space Telescope.”
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/12/136250388/scientist-willard-boyle-dies
Draper Prize Winner Vint Cerf to Judge Google Science Fair
Vint Cerf, winner of the Draper Prize in 2001 and vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, will serve on the panel of judges for the 2011 Google Science Fair.
2009
Draper Prize Recipients will be Featured in "Hot Spots of Invention" Symposium
2003 Draper Prize recipient, Brad Parkinson, will give keynote at the “” symposium at the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center on Nov. 6. In addition, 1989 recipient Robert Noyce will be the topic of discussion at one of the symposium’s sessions on Nov. 7.
