Two Georgia Tech faculty-Biing-Hwang (Fred) Juang and C.F. Jeff Wu-can now add membership to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to their growing lists of honors. The NAE recently elected 76 new members and 11 foreign associates, bringing the total U.S. membership to 2,174 and the number of foreign associates to 172. The election of Juang and Wu brings Georgia Tech's number of active NAE members to 25.

"A big part of a top-notch engineering program is having the very best professors, and I congratulate Professors Juang and Wu on their accomplishment. We are always looking for ways to become better, but having these two gentlemen acknowledged for their contributions to our discipline demonstrates both of the vitality of our programs and our commitment to providing the best possible learning experience for our students," says Don Giddens, dean of the College of Engineering.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering 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."

The NAE recognizes Juang, Motorola Foundation chair professor and Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) for his contributions to speech coding and speech recognition. Juang's research interest is in developing mathematical methods and engineering practices that make it possible for people to speak with machines naturally and to interact with other people freely even though they are far apart.

"The academies are advisors to the nation on science, engineering and medicine," says Juang. "That probably means that I may have an additional duty as a citizen to offer my professional knowledge to help society. Being able to help is a good thing-always enjoyable."

Juang came to Georgia Tech in 2002 from Avaya Labs Research, where he served as director of Multimedia Technologies Research. Previously, he was director of Acoustics and Speech Research at Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies from 1996-2001. He has also held various technical and supervisory positions in the Speech Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories and was a research scientist at Signal Technology Inc. Juang was the team leader that devised innovative methods for building the world's highest accuracy and most robustly connected digit recognition system-one which is used reliably more than four million times each month by AT&T customers. He is the author of more than 165 publications and co-author of a major textbook, "Fundamentals of Speech Recognition," and he holds nearly 20 patents.

The NAE recognizes Wu, Coca-Cola chair in Engineering Statistics, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering for conceiving and building modern systems of experimental design based on contemporary methods for parameter estimating to provide quality improvements. Wu is known for his innovative and high-impact work in modern Design of Experiments (DOE) which has helped western manufacturing industries greatly improve quality. With his election, Wu is one of the few statisticians in the NAE and the first academic statistician to receive this honor.

Wu says, "I have spent more than half of my life in the United States, and as an immigrant I have always felt that this is the greatest country on earth for immigrants. I am grateful to many people and thankful to my many former students. The new recognition may make it easier for engineering faculty to accept and work with statisticians."

Wu has played a key role in the building of a modern system of experimental design. Over the years, his research groups from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Waterloo in Canada and the University of Michigan have developed various methods to build a comprehensive system for running experiments, modeling data, and system optimization/robustness. This culminated in the publication of the prize-winning book with M. Hamada, "Experiments: Planning, Analysis, and Parameter Design Optimization," 2000, John Wiley.

The NAE will hold an Induction Ceremony for all new members in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 3. The full list of the newly elected members is available on the NAE website at www.nae.edu.

The National Academy of Engineering was founded in 1964 to advance engineering and technology. It conducts activities jointly with the National Academy of Sciences. The NAE is a private, independent, nonprofit institution that acts as advisor to the federal government, and, through its independent programs, provides a channel for the advancement of engineering and technology as benefits humanity.