Hanif Sherali, the W. Thomas Rice Chair of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Sherali, a professor of industrial and systems engineering (ISE), was among 78 engineers and eight foreign associates elected from all engineering disciplines to membership in the NAE for 2000.
Sherali was elected for his contributions to engineering system design based on optimization theory and is affiliated with the NAE's Industrial, Manufacturing and Operational Systems Engineering section.
Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made "important contributions to engineering theory and practice, including significant contributions to the literature of engineering theory and practice," and those who have demonstrated "unusual accomplishment in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology."
Sherali, who joined the ISE faculty in 1979, has received numerous research and education awards during his tenure at the university, including the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE), the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence, the IIE Fellow Award, the Thomas L. Saaty Prize for Applied Advances in the Mathematical and Management Sciences, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) Computer Science Technical Section Research Award, the INFORMS Koopman Prize, the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, the IIE Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award, and the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Among Sherali's research accomplishments is the invention, in collaboration with graduate students, of the Reformulation-Linearization Technique. This ground-breaking work has been applied to a variety of complex, real-world problems that arise in production, location, distribution, and engineering design situations.