The NAE Charles Draper Prize, awarded for advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering .
The U.S. National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Draper Prize,[1] which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Engineering"—the others are the Academy's Russ and Gordon Prizes. The Draper Prize is awarded biennially and the winner of each of these prizes receives $500,000.[2] The Draper prize is named for Charles Stark Draper, the "father of inertial navigation", an MIT professor and founder of Draper Laboratory.
2005: Minoru S. "Sam" Araki [de], Francis J. Madden [de], Edward A. Miller [de], James W. Plummer, and Don H. Schoessler [de] for the design, development, and operation of Corona, the first space-based Earth observation systems
2009: Robert H. Dennard for his invention and contributions to the development of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), used universally in computers and other data processing and communication systems[7]
2011: Frances H. Arnold and Willem P.C. Stemmer for their individual contributions to directed evolution, a process that allows researchers to guide the creation of certain properties in proteins and cells. This technique has been used in food ingredients, pharmaceuticals, toxicology, agricultural products, gene delivery systems, laundry aids, and biofuels
2016: Andrew J. Viterbi for development of the Viterbi algorithm, its transformational impact on digital wireless communications, and its significant applications in speech recognition and synthesis and in bioinformatics.[11]
2018: Bjarne Stroustrup for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language.[12]
2020: Jean Fréchet and C. Grant Willson for the invention, development, and commercialization of chemically amplified materials for micro- and nanofabrication, enabling the extreme miniaturization of microelectronic devices.[13]
2024: Stuart Parkin for engineering spintronic technologies, enabling digital information storage that serves as a foundation for today’s data-driven world.[15]
The NAE website shows that no Draper Prize was awarded in 2010, 2017, 2019 or 2021.[16] Since the award is a biennial one, it was probably only given in even years beginning in 2016. The Russ Prize, also from the NAE, is awarded in odd years.
