ARLINGTON , Va., March 11, 2005 – Five biomedical engineers are among the 74 new members and 10 foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions for an engineer. Membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice and education.

The election brings the total U.S. membership to 2,195 and 178 foreign associates. Four biomedical engineers were elected to the NAE and one was among those named foreign associates.

The Whitaker Foundation has supported the four new NAE members from the United States directly or through grants to their departments. Their names, institutions and reasons for membership are:

George Georgiou, Joe C. Walter Jr. Endowed Chair, department of chemical engineering, University of Texas, Austin. For protein engineering, especially the development of therapeutics to biological warfare agents, protein manufacturing technologies, and combinatorial library screening methodologies.

Steven A. Goldstein, Henry Ruppenthal Family Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For contributions to our understanding of bone micromechanical and remodeling behaviors and their translations into gene therapies and fracture fixations.

Allan S. Hoffman, professor, department of bioengineering and chemical engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. For pioneering work on the medical uses of polymeric materials.

Geert W. Schmid-Schoenbein, professor of bioengineering, University of California, San Diego. For improvements to the understanding of how white blood cells are activated and the effects on medicine and pharmacology.

The biomedical engineer named foreign associate was Rik Willem Jan Huiskes, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands. He was cited for advancing the understanding of how bone prostheses affect the living human skeleton.

The full NAE release