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Look Who's Coming!

Centennial Committee
Jehoshua Bruck
Michelle Effros
Ali Hajimiri
Babak Hassibi
Robert McEliece
P.P. Vaidyanathan

Thomas Everhart
Caltech Professor of Electrical Engineering & Applied Physics, Emeritus; Caltech President, Emeritus; Member of Board of Trustees at Caltech

Thomas E. Everhart is President Emeritus of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California and also Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, Emeritus. He received an A.B. degree in physics "magna cum laude qui adseculus est summos honores" in 1953 from Harvard University. He received his M.Sc. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1955, and earned a Ph.D. in engineering from Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, in 1958, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Everhart joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1958, where he served in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for more than 20 years. In addition to teaching and research, he also served as chairman of the department during 1972-77. In January 1979, he became Joseph Silbert Dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.  In August 1984 he became Chancellor at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois where he remained until accepting the presidency at the California Institute of Technology in September, 1987. He became President Emeritus on October 15, 1997. From February until July, 1998, he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in England. He also holds a guest appointment at the University of California at Santa Barbara as Senior Advisor to the Chancellor and Distinguished Visiting Professor. He is the Senior Scientific Adviser to the W. M. Keck Foundation.

Everhart has served on the National Academy of Engineering Council and Executive Committee, and on the Board of Directors of KCET, the Los Angeles area public television station. He has previously chaired the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, General Motors Science Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Engineering Committee on Membership, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Scientific and Educational Advisory Committee. He has served as Chairman of the Council of Presidents, Universities Research Association and as a member of the URA Board of Trustees. He has also served on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Universities.

His main areas of interest and expertise have been in the research and development of scanning electron microscopes, electron beams as applied to
semiconductor analysis and fabrication, and basic science and engineering relating to these subjects.  In 1984, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) honored him with its Centennial Medal, which recognizes outstanding achievements in electrical and electronics engineering. In 1989 he received the Benjamin Garver Lamme Award from the American Society for Engineering Education.  The University of California at Berkeley awarded him the Clark Kerr Award recognizing his contributions to the advancement of higher education in May of 1992 and the Founder's Award in April of 1995 from the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley. In 2002, the IEEE awarded him its Founder’s Medal and he was honored with the Okawa Prize.

Throughout his academic career, Everhart has maintained a close relationship with industry. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Agilent Technologies, Reveo, Saint-Gobain, Raytheon, and Hughes Electronics Corporations, and two non-profits: the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Electric Power Research Institute. He has also been a member of the R. R. Donnelley Technical Advisory Council, and a consultant to such firms as Ampex Research and Development Laboratories, Bell Laboratories, Hughes Research Laboratories, IBM Research Laboratory, Watkins-Johnson Company, and Westinghouse Research Laboratories. Dr. Everhart stepped down in 1997 as Vice Chairman of the Council on Competitiveness. He currently serves on the boards of Acorn Technologies and Novelx.

He joined the W. M. Keck Foundation as Senior Science Advisor in 1997 after relinquishing the duties of President of Caltech. He was elected a member of the California Institute of Technology Board of Trustees in 1998 and Senior Trustee in 2004. He served on the Harvard Board of Overseers from 1999 until 2005, the last year as President. He joined the Kavli Foundation Board of Directors in 2001 and was named to the Keck Foundation Board in 2007.

Everhart has strong international ties. He was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, England, while pursuing his doctorate, and has been a visiting professor or fellow at the Instituet fuer Angewandte Physik, Tuebingen, West Germany; Waseda University, Tokyo; Osaka University, and Clare Hall, Cambridge.  He has served on review committees for RIKEN in Japan and for the Australian National University.

He is a member of many professional, scholarly and honorary societies including Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, the National Academy of Engineering, Boehmische Physikalische Gesellschaft, and the Electron Microscopy Society of America.  He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship.  He has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of The Royal Academy of Engineering (Great Britain).

Everhart and his wife, Doris Arleen (Wentz), have four children—Janet Sue, Nancy Jean, David William, and John Thomas—and six grandchildren. Office address: Office of the President Emeritus, California Institute of Technology, Mail Code 202-31, Pasadena, California, 91125. Home address: PO Box 1639, Goleta, CA 93116. His email address is: everhart@caltech.edu.