Two UF professors named National Academy of Inventors Fellows

Mark Tehranipoor and Rajiv Singh, University of Florida professors of engineering, have been elected to the National Academy of Inventors.

The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Election as a NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded to academic inventors.

“Mark and Rajiv have made extraordinary contributions to their fields and demonstrated a commitment to applying their work to improve society,” said David Norton, vice president for research at UF. “Their election as fellows of the NAI recognizes the impact they have had not only through their research but through their patented inventions that underpin and secure much of our modern world.”

Tehranipoor is the Intel Charles E. Young Preeminence Endowed Chair Professor in Cybersecurity and the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He founded the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research and led the institute from 2015 to 2022. Tehranipoor directs or co-directs multiple cybersecurity centers on and off campus. He has dozens of issued or pending patents, is a fellow of the IEEE and ACM and co-founded several international conferences on cybersecurity.

Singh is professor emeritus in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He holds 26 patents for his work in advanced semiconductor processing that supports applications in smartphones, 5G communications and other areas. Singh is one of the original developers of pulsed laser deposition, a technique used in advanced materials manufacturing. He is a fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, the Materials Research Society and the American Physical Society. Singh taught at UF for 30 years before retiring in 2020 and was elected to the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame in 2021.

To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 58,000 issued U.S. patents, which have generated over 13,000 licensed technologies and companies, and created more than one million jobs. In addition, over $3 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries.

The 2022 Fellow class hails from 110 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes worldwide. They collectively hold over 4,800 issued U.S. patents. Among the new class of Fellows are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Fellows of AAAS and other prestigious organizations, Nobel Laureates, other honors and distinctions, as well as senior leadership from universities and research institutions. Their body of research and entrepreneurship covers a broad range of scientific disciplines involved with technology transfer of their inventions for the benefit of society.

The 2022 class of Fellows will be inducted at the Fellows Induction Ceremony at the 12th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Inventors on June 27th, 2023 in Washington, D.C.