Charles Stark Draper Prize

The National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Charles Stark Draper Prize, 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 being the Academy's Russ and Gordon Prizes. The winner of each of these prizes receives $500,000. The Draper prize is named for Charles Stark Draper, the "father of inertial navigation", an MIT professor and founder of Draper Laboratory.

Past winners

• 1989: Jack S. Kilby and Robert N. Noyce for their independent development of the monolithic integrated circuit
• 1991: Sir Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain for their independent development of the turbojet engine
• 1993: John Backus for his development of FORTRAN, the first widely used, general purpose, high-level computer language
• 1995: John R. Pierce and Harold A. Rosen for their development of communication satellite technology
• 1997: Vladimir Haensel for his invention of "platforming"
• 1999: Charles K. Kao, Robert D. Maurer, and John B. MacChesney for the development of fiber optics
• 2001: Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts for the development of the Internet
• 2002: Robert Langer for the bioengineering of revolutionary medical drug delivery systems
• 2003: Ivan A. Getting and Bradford W. Parkinson for their work developing the Global Positioning System
• 2004: Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor, and Charles P. Thacker for their work on Alto, the first practical networked computer
• 2005: Minoru S. "Sam" Araki, Francis J. Madden, Edward A. Miller, James W. Plummer, and Don H. Schoessler for the design, development, and operation of Corona, the first space-based Earth observation systems
• 2006: Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith for the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), a light-sensitive component at the heart of digital cameras and other widely used imaging technologies
• 2007: Tim Berners-Lee for developing the World Wide Web
• 2008: Rudolf E. Kalman for developing the Kalman filter
• 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
• 2011: Frances H. Arnold and Willem P.C. Stemmer for their individual contributions to directed evolution, a process which 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
• 2012: George H. Heilmeier, Wolfgang Helfrich, Martin Schadt, and T. Peter Brody for their contributions to the development of liquid crystal display (LCD) technologies
• 2013: Thomas Haug, Martin Cooper, Yoshihisa Okumura (奥村 善久), Richard H. Frenkiel, and Joel S. Engel - mobile phone pioneers who laid the groundwork for today’s smartphone
• 2014: John Goodenough, Yoshio Nishi(西 美緒), Rachid Yazami and Akira Yoshino(吉野 彰) - rechargeable battery pioneers who laid the groundwork for today’s lithium ion battery.
• 2015: Isamu Akasaki, M. George Craford, Russell Dupuis, Nick Holonyak, Jr. and Shuji Nakamura for the invention, development, and commercialization of materials and processes for light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
• 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.