ITHACA, N.Y. -- The editors of Science Spectrum magazine and US Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine have selected Kevin T. Kornegay, Cornell University associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Cornell Broadband Communications Research Laboratory, as one of the "50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science" for 2004.

The award was presented Sept. 18 in Nashville, Tenn., during the Emerald Awards Conference, an event that celebrates the accomplishments of several minorities in science and promotes their greater representation among science professionals.

The same organization named Kornegay Black Engineer of the Year in 2001.

Kornegay and the other honorees are featured in the September issue of Science Spectrum, which is distributed to the top science programs and to scientists across the country. There will be a special focus this year on making grade school students aware of the honorees through the magazine.

Honorees are chosen for this annual list based on their work in making science part of global society. During the year that the list is publicized, its members are presented to young people as role models, and their accomplishments are presented as examples of the important contributions made on a daily basis by the small but growing cadre of black research scientists.

Kornegay's research focuses on the design of integrated circuits that will operate at radio frequencies for broadband wired, wireless and optical communications systems, such as high-speed wireless computer networks.

He is known among engineering students at Cornell for his championing of the autonomous underwater vehicle team, which has competed at the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition since 2000. The team finished first in 2003 and has placed second three times.Kornegay earned his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. From 1992 to 1994, he was employed as a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. He was an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University from 1994 until 1997, when he became the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1998. He supervises a dozen graduate students and has launched 14 other students, 11 of them from Cornell, into the world with Ph.D.s. "They are all employed," he notes.

He is the recipient of numerous other awards, including the 2004 Menchel Award, a National Science Foundation Career Award, an IBM Faculty Award, the National Semiconductor Faculty Development Award and the General Motors Faculty Fellowship Award. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society. He also is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi engineering honor societies and faculty adviser of the Cornell chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers.