Engineering Honors

Two faculty members in the College of Engineering at NC State University are among 84 new members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Jagdish (Jay) Narayan is the John C.C. Fan Family Distinguished Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Paul Turinsky is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering.

Narayan and Turinsky will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8, 2017. Their election will bring the number of NAE members in the college to 17.

Narayan was recognized by the NAE for contributions in heteroepitaxial film growth by laser ablation in large misfit systems and new materials. He is a renowned expert in the areas of advanced materials processing, characterization and modeling; high-temperature superconductors; diamond thin films; and advanced semiconductor thin film heterostructures and devices.

In 2015, Narayan announced the invention of a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, that is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond and can be used to produce diamond at room temperature and at ambient air pressure.

Narayan invented domain matching epitaxy (DME), which is based upon matching of integral multiples of lattice planes across the film-substrate interface, to address epitaxial growth of heterostructures across the misfit scale. In the late 1970s, he pioneered the concept of solute trapping in semiconductors by his discoveries of laser annealing and the formation of supersaturated semiconductor alloys. Narayan also invented integrated smart sensors and 3-D self-assembled nanostructures with oriented magnetic nanodots formed by the DME paradigm for information storage.

He is a fellow of the Materials Research Society; the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society; AAAS; APS, ASM International and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a winner of the Acta Materialia Gold Medal, the ASM Gold Medal, the TMS RF Mehl Gold Medal and the North Carolina Award in Science, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the state of North Carolina.

Turinsky was recognized by the NAE for the development of simulation technology for the economic operation, safety and life extension of nuclear power stations.

Turinsky’s areas of expertise are computational reactor physics in support of mathematical optimization of fuel management and nuclear fuel-cycle multiobjective decisions; uncertainty quantification and data assimilation in support of optimum experimental design applied to nuclear power plant safety and fuel-cycle assessments; and adaptive model refinement applied to nuclear power plant transient simulation.

He served as the chief scientist for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL). CASL modeling is making the current generation of light water reactors in use across the United States more predictable with regard to behavior, facilitating improvements in economics while assuring reactor safety.

Turinsky is a member of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a fellow of the American Nuclear Society and a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the American Society for Engineering Education and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a former head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at NC State. From 1973 to 1980, he worked in a variety of positions for Westinghouse Electric and was an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1970 to 1973.

He is the recipient of the American Society for Engineering Education Glenn Murphy Award, Edison Electric Institute Power Engineering Educator Award, the DOE E.O. Lawrence Award in Atomic Energy, and the American Nuclear Society’s Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physics Award and Arthur Holly Compton Award.

Learn more about the extraordinary engineering being pursued at NC State.