Two members of Cornell's engineering faculty have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. They are Toby Berger, the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor of Engineering emeritus, and Jean-Yves Parlange, professor of biological and environmental engineering.

Election to the academy is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer.

"We are proud of the accomplishments of these faculty members," said W. Kent Fuchs, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. "Election to the academy is an outstanding honor for these individuals that also brings honor to the university."

According to the academy, Berger was selected "for contributions to the theory and practice of lossy data compression." Berger's research embraces a broad range of topics in information theory, digital communication and signal processing. His work on video compression led to the creation of software that allows full-motion videoconferencing on systems with very low bandwidth. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1966 after receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University and working briefly at Raytheon. After spending his entire career at Cornell, he retired Jan. 1 and now holds a faculty position at the University of Virginia.

Parlange was chosen for "fundamental contributions to the formulation of water flow and solute (chemicals in a solution) transport in soils and groundwater." His research focuses on the use of water in agriculture. Often collaborating with scientists in the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as academics from several universities, he has studied the way water moves over and through soils as well as erosion and sediment transport. In the latest phase of his 44-year career, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1985 after working at Yale, the University of Washington and Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

Among others elected to the academy this year were several Cornell alumni, including Samuel Bodman '60, chemical engineering, the U.S. Secretary of Energy; M. Douglas McIlroy '54, engineering physics, former head of the research department at Bell Laboratories and now adjunct professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Surendra P. Shah, Ph.D. '65, chemical engineering, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University; Ching Wan Tang, Ph.D. '75, distinguished research fellow at Eastman Kodak Co.; and Ali Galip Ulsoy, M.S. '75, mechanical engineering, the William Clay Ford Professor of Manufacturing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Academy membership honors those who have made "important contributions to engineering theory and practice, including significant contributions to the literature of engineering theory and practice," and who have demonstrated accomplishment in "the pioneering of new fields of engineering, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."