Jingguang Chen and Jeannette M. Wing Elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Jingguang Chen, Thayer Lindsley Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Jeannette M. Wing, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering and executive vice president for research at Columbia University, have been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). 

“We congratulate Professors Chen and Wing on receiving one of the highest honors in science and engineering,” said Dean of Columbia Engineering Shih-Fu Chang. “Their contributions to their respective fields are immense and will continue to advance knowledge that makes a positive impact on society.”

Jingguang Chen

Jingguang Chen is the Thayer Lindsley Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia Engineering, with a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory where he is co-founder and director of the Synchrotron Catalysis Consortium at the National Synchrotron Light Source. He has made pioneering contributions to the understanding and use of novel catalytic materials for catalysis and electrocatalysis. Chen investigates the physical and chemical properties of bimetallic and metal carbide catalysts. His research has inspired fundamental studies in catalytic and fuel cell processes, including the exploration of ways to reduce the use of platinum, a rare and expensive metal, in the catalysis process to produce hydrogen.

Chen's group also applies advanced synchrotron techniques to identify and characterize reactive species in catalysts. This knowledge can help develop less expensive, more stable catalytic materials for applications ranging from fuel cells to biomass utilization.

Chen joined Columbia Engineering in 2012 from the University of Delaware, where he was the Claire D. LeClaire Professor of Chemical Engineering and the co-director of the Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Center. He is also the president of the North American Catalysis Society and served as the chair of the Catalysis Division of American Chemical Society from 2014 to 2016. He earned his BS in chemistry from Nanjing University, China and his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Jeannette Wing

Jeannette M. Wing is the executive vice president for Research at Columbia University, responsible for overall research across the University at the Morningside and Manhattanville campuses, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Nevis Laboratories, and internationally.

Wing joined Columbia in 2017 as the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and professor of computer science. Wing came to Columbia from industry where she was corporate vice president at Microsoft Research. Previously, she also served on the faculty and as department head in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and served at the National Science Foundation as assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Her research contributions have been in the areas of trustworthy AI, security and privacy, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. She is author of the highly influential 2006 essay "Computational Thinking,’’ which posited computational thinking as a universally applicable skillset and is credited with helping to establish and expand the centrality of computer science in new fields.

She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also received an honorary doctorate from Linköping University.

Chen and Wing today join a cohort of 114 new NAE members and 21 international members, including fellow Columbia University faculty member, Ruth DeFries of the Columbia Climate School.