Prabhakar Raghavan Elected to National Academy of Engineering

On February 8 the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced that it had elected 65 new members and nine foreign associates. Among this year’s honorees is Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president and head of Yahoo! Research.

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." This year’s awardees bring the total U.S. membership to 2,227 and the number of foreign associates to 194.

Raghavan’s award citation reads as follows: “For significant contributions to algorithms and the structure of the World Wide Web.” Prabhakar has been the head of Yahoo! Research since 2005. His research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was the chief technology officer at Verity and has held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research. Prabhakar received his PhD from Berkeley and is a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.