Professors Thomas W. Parks and Stephen B. Pope have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year, an honor counted among the highest professional distinctions for an engineer. Cornell trustee N.R. Narayana Murthy was also elected a foreign associate to the academy.

Parks, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, was honored for "contributions to digital filter design, fast computation of Fourier transforms and education." Parks' research interests include design of multirate signal processing systems, time-frequency signal analysis, and detection and classification of marine mammal sounds. He is a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a recipient of the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Gold Medal for his work on interpolation and the Parks-McClellan algorithm.

Pope, the Sibley College Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was recognized for his "contributions to the modeling of turbulent flow, including the development of probability distribution function methodologies for turbulent combustion." Pope conducts research in the fluid mechanics field of turbulence, as well as computational methods for combustion chemistry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society (London) and was recently awarded the Fluid Dynamics Prize from the American Physical Society.

Murthy, chairman of the board and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies Ltd. in Bangalore, India, was honored for "contributions to the development of global information technology services." Murthy founded Infosys in 1981 and served as its CEO for two decades. He is chairman of the governing body of the International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore, and has served on the boards of schools including the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Parks and Pope were among 68 new members, and Murthy among nine foreign associates, elected to the academy this year. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,267 and number of foreign associates to 196.