Kevin Kornegay is named one of the top 50 black research scientists

Kornegay

The editors of Science Spectrum magazine and US Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine have selected Kevin T. Kornegay, Cornell associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Cornell Broadband Communications Research Laboratory, as one of the "50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science" for 2004. The award was presented Sept. 18 in Nashville, Tenn., during the Emerald Awards Conference, an event that celebrates the accomplishments of several minorities in science and promotes their greater representation among science professionals.

The same organization named Kornegay Black Engineer of the Year in 2001.

Kornegay and the other honorees are featured in the September issue of Science Spectrum, which is distributed to the top science programs and to scientists all over the country.

Honorees are chosen for this annual list based on their work in making science part of global society. During the year that the list is publicized, its members are presented to young people as role models and their accomplishments are upheld as examples of the important contributions made on a daily basis by the small but growing cadre of black research scientists.

Kornegay's research focuses on radio frequency and millimeter wave integrated circuit design for broadband wireless and optical communications systems, such as a one-gigabit-per-second wireless local area network transceiver and a 40-gigabit-per-second transceiver for optical data transmission.

Kornegay also is known among engineering students at Cornell for his championing of the Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV) team, which develops small, robotic submarines. Since it started competing in 2000, the CUAUV team has had three second-place finishes at the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, and it took first place in 2003.

Kornegay earned his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. From 1992 to 1994, he was employed as a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. He was an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University from 1994 until 1997, when he became the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1998. He currently supervises a dozen graduate students and has previously launched 14 (of which 11 are Cornell students) into the world with Ph.D. degrees. "They're all employed," he noted.

He is the recipient of numerous other awards, including the 2004 Menchel Award, a National Science Foundation Career Award, an IBM Faculty Award, the National Semiconductor Faculty Development Award and the General Motors Faculty Fellowship Award, as well as several best paper awards.

He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society. He also is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi engineering honor societies and faculty adviser of the Cornell chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers.