William A. Wulf, University Professor, AT&T Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and President of the National Academy of Engineering, was awarded the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineering.

The Ralph Coats Roe Medal, established in 1972, recognizes an outstanding contribution toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineer's worth to contemporary society.

The successful candidate is expected to give an authoritative lecture in his/her field at a general session during the International Mechanical Engineering Congress.

Ralph Coats Roe was a pioneer and innovator in the design and construction of highly efficient power plants and advanced desalting processes. He was an inspiration to his colleagues by his great achievements through self-education in highly sophisticated technologies.

Previous winners of this medal include Carl Sagan, Tracy Kidder, and Lee Iacocca and Congressman Donald L. Ritter.

Professor Wulf earned the first computer science degree awarded at the University of Virginia in 1968. He was on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University for many years and founded and served as chairman of Tartan Laboratories until 1988. He grew the company to roughly 100 employess who worked on developing and marketing optimizing compilers, notably for Ada. Tartan was sold to Texas Instruments in 1995.

He was elected President of the National Academy of Engineering in April 1997; he had previously served as Interim President beginning in July 1996. Together with the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering operates under a congressional charter and presidential executive orders that call on it to provide advice to the government on issues of science and engineering.

He is on leave from the University of Virginia, where he is a University Professor and the AT&T Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in the Computer Science Department. Among his activities while at the University, were a complete revision of the undergraduate computer science curriculum, research on computer architecture and computer security, and an effort to assist humanities scholars explore information technology.

Professor Wulf is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE, is the author or co-author of three books and over 100 papers and holds two patents