Three Whiting School of Engineering faculty members have been elected fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), a distinction that recognizes and honors academic inventors who have created or facilitated outstanding inventions that have had an impact on society.
Rama Chellappa, Sharon Gerecht, and Nitish Thakor are among five faculty members from Johns Hopkins elected as NAI fellows this year. They join the more than 4,000 current fellows of the academy, which features members of more than 250 institutions worldwide. They will be formally inducted at the NAI Fellows Induction Ceremony on June 7 to 9, 2021 in Tampa, Florida.
Honorees from Johns Hopkins Engineering
Rama Chellappa
Chellappa is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, with research interests spanning computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Chellappa's work has shaped the field of facial recognition technology, and he is known as an expert in machine learning. At Hopkins he contributes to the Mathematical Institute for Data Science and the Center for Imaging Science.
Sharon Gerecht
Gerecht is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, the Edward J. Schaefer Professor in Engineering, and director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology. Gerecht is an internationally recognized expert in vascular and stem cell biology and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Together with her research group, she studies the interactions between stem cells and their microenvironments with the long-term goal of engineering artificial cell microenvironments.
Nitish Thakor
Thakor is a professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at the Whiting School and a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and director of the Laboratory for Neuroengineering. Thakor conducts research on neurological instrumentation, biomedical signal processing, micro and nanotechnologies, neural prosthesis, and neural and rehabilitation techniques. Thakor also serves as director of the NIH Training Grant on Neuroengineering. Currently, he is developing a next-generation neurally controlled upper limb prosthesis alongside a multi-university consortium funded by DARPA.