Kennedy, University Professor and the John and Ann Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering in the Department of Computer Science, is among196 new fellows of the academy, the nation's oldest and most illustrious learned society. New fellows were nominated and elected by members through a highly competitive process on the basis of pre-eminent contributions to their disciplines.
The Academy, which conducts a wide range of interdisciplinary studies and public policy research, has a broad-based membership comprised of scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities, the arts, public affairs and business.
Kennedy is one of the nation's foremost experts on high-performance computing.
His research focuses on developing high-level programming tools for parallel and distributed computer systems. He currently leads two multi-institutional research efforts: the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute, a consortium of five universities and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Grid Application Development Software Project, an NSF-sponsored effort involving eight universities.
His national service includes a 1998 appointment to co-chair the Clinton White House's Information Technology Advisory Committee, a group charged with reviewing the effectiveness of all of the nation's federally funded research and development spending for information technology.
Kennedy earned his bachelor's degree from Rice in 1967 and joined the university's faculty in 1971 after earning his master's and doctorate at New York University. He helped found Rice's Computer Science Department in 1984, the Computer and Information Technology Institute in 1987, the Center for Research on Parallel Computation in 1988, and the Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft), which he still directs, in 1998.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots to cultivate art and science by honoring intellectual achievement, leadership and creativity in all fields.
The 2005 class of fellows also includes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Cornell, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, journalist Tom Brokaw, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Pulitzer Prize winners Horton Foote and Tony Kushner.
New fellows will be inducted at the academy's Cambridge, Mass., headquarters on Oct. 8.