Portland State University
is pleased to announce that Professor James F. Pankow was elected to the
prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on February 6.
Election to the National
Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded
to an engineer. Academy membership
honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research,
practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions
to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and
developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional
fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to
engineering education.
The NAE shares
responsibility with the National Academy of Sciences to advise the federal
government on questions of policy in science and technology.
Pankow, a professor with
a joint appoint in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the
Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Chemistry
in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, earned the honor for his
extraordinary contributions to the fields of environmental analytical methods,
and his internationally regarded work in the behavior of air pollutants and
aerosol particles in the earth's atmosphere. His groundbreaking work on this theory, which is used in climate change
research, resulted in his receipt of the 1999 American Chemical Society
Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology, and of
the 2005 Haagen-Smit Prize. He has been
listed as a “highly cited researcher” since 2003.
Pankow is also very
interested in contaminants in drinking water, and has recently secured a new
five year project from the U.S.G.S on that topic. He is the author of more than
130 peer-reviewed publications, and four books. Pankow’s academic training
combined basic chemistry (B.A., SUNY, 1973) with engineering (Ph.D., Caltech,
1979).
Pankow’s election to this
elite institution makes him the only professor currently active in the state of
Oregon to belong to the NAE. Pankow joins
an exclusive group; among the other NAE inductees for 2009 are Sergey Brin,
co-founder of Google, and Dr. Matthew O'Donnell, Dean of Engineering at the
University of Washington.
For more information
about the National Academy of Engineering, please visit the NAE web site.
National Academy of
Engineering Elects 65 Members and Nine Foreign Associates
