Cornell professor of computer science Jon Kleinberg '93 is one of 65 new members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) this year. He was elected "for contributions to the understanding of the structure and behavior of the World Wide Web and other complex networks."

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions for an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice or education," according to the NAE Web site.

Also elected this year were four other Cornell alumni: Howard J. Bruschi '62, M.Eng. '64; Cynthia Dwork, M.Sc. '81, Ph.D. '83; Barbara J. Grosz '69; and James A. Miller, M.Eng. '69, Ph.D. '74.

Kleinberg studies how Web sites link to one another and the way people link to one another on the Web. His insights were partly responsible for the Google search engine's strategy of ranking Web pages based on the number of pages that link to them.

Besides his Web expertise, Kleinberg has collaborated with biologists on problems in protein folding and databasing of biological molecules. Currently he is working with behavioral scientists to study the sociology of the Web and how it has changed over time.

Kleinberg received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Cornell in 1993 and an S.M. (combination of MBA and M.S.) degree in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1996 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Among his many honors are the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award, the 2006 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematics Union, a Sloan Foundation fellowship, a Packard Foundation fellowship, and the Initiatives in Research Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

In 2007 Kleinberg was also elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And in the fall 2007 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Kleinberg was profiled as one of "America's Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences."