The award, which includes a gold medal and $10,000 cash prize, will be presented to Everhart at a ceremony on June 22 in Toronto, Canada.
Long a major figure in electrical engineering, Everhart as a young faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley became the first person to build a scanning electron microscope on a U.S. college campus. With his graduate students, he used the microscope to better understand the nature of semiconductor devices, integrated circuits, electron-beam penetration and energy loss in solids, microfabrication, and computer-controlled measurements of solid-state devices.
A Kansas City native, Everhart earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1953, his master's from UCLA in 1955, and his doctorate in engineering from the University of Cambridge in 1958 as a Marshall Scholar. After returning to the United States from England in 1958, he joined the Berkeley faculty, later serving as the chairman of the electrical engineering and computer science department from 1972 to 1977.
He became dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell University in 1979, and chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984.
In 1987, Everhart was appointed president of Caltech, and served in that position until his retirement in October 1997. He presently holds a guest appointment at UC Santa Barbara, and is senior scientific adviser to the W. M. Keck Foundation. He also served in 1998 as pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Everhart is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Royal Academy of Engineering in Great Britain. He is also a fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society, with more than 366,000 members in approximately 150 countries. Through its members, the IEEE is a leading authority on areas ranging from aerospace, computers, and telecommunications, to biomedicine, electric power, and consumer electronics.
The Institute produces a large portion of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and control technology fields, and has developed more than 900 active consensus standards. The organization also sponsors or cosponsors more than 300 international technical conferences each year.
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