Babatunde Ogunnaike, William L. Friend Chair of Chemical Engineering and interim dean of the College of Engineering, has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.
Academy membership is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer, recognizing those who have emerged as pioneers in new and developing fields of technology, made major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developed innovative approaches to engineering education.
Ogunnaike’s model-based advances in the field of process control, developed during his previous 13-year research career at DuPont, today affect a number of commercial processes essential to the manufacturing of plastics, fuels, medicines and many other products. Additionally, his textbooks have been used to educate and train thousands of engineers in systems control and instrumentation at more than 29 universities.
The author or editor of four books and more than 75 papers and book chapters, Ogunnaike has served as associate editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and he is associate editor of the American Chemical Society’s Industrial & Engineering Chemistry.
An outstanding scholar and mentor, Ogunnaike joins five other UD College of Engineering faculty and emeritus faculty as National Academy of Engineering members. They include Mark Barteau, Dominic Di Toro, David L. Mills, T. W. Fraser Russell and Stanley Sandler.