Sanjoy Banerjee, Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at The City College of New York, and Director of the City University of New York (CUNY) Energy Institute, has been elected to the National Academy of Inventors’ (NAI) Class of 2023 Fellows. Election as an Academy Fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors.
Banerjee and 161 other academic inventors will be inducted as NAI Fellows at the Academy’s 13th annual meeting on June 18, 2024, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
His new peers include two Nobel Laureates – Morten P. Meldal (University of Copenhagen) and Svante Paabo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) — three National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, 22 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and individuals holding other honors and distinctions as well as senior leadership from universities and research institutions. Click here for the full list of 2023 NAI Fellows.
The 2023 class of Fellows represents NAI’s foundational and continuing commitment to diversifying innovation on all levels, with underrepresented inventors comprising 33% of this year’s class. It also showcases regional diversity with Fellows representing 35 U.S. states and 10 countries, exemplifying the Academy’s belief that great innovators can be found everywhere.
“This year’s class of NAI Fellows showcases the caliber of researchers that are found within the innovation ecosystem. Each of these individuals are making significant contributions to both science and society through their work,” said Dr. Paul R. Sanberg, FNAI, President of the NAI. “This new class, in conjunction with our existing Fellows, are creating innovations that are driving crucial advancements across a variety of disciplines and are stimulating the global and national economy in immeasurable ways as they move these technologies from lab to marketplace. We are honored to welcome these highly regarded innovators to the Academy and look forward to formally inducting them at our 2024 Annual Conference in the Research Triangle of North Carolina.”
The new Fellows hail from 118 research universities, and governmental and non-profit research institutions worldwide. This class includes 89 individuals from the Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions and 128 individuals from R1 universities that boast very high research activity. Collectively, the 2023 Fellows hold over 4,600 issued U.S. patents. Their work spans across disciplines and exemplifies their dedication and inspiration to translating research into commercial technologies that benefit society.
In addition to a Distinguished Professorship at CCNY and heading the Energy Institute, Banerjee is also the Founder and Chairman of Urban Electric Power, spun out of the CUNY Energy Institute to develop ‘beyond lithium’ batteries. Banerjee joined CCNY from UC Santa Barbara, where he had been Department Chair and previously taught at Berkeley, and McMaster University, and worked at Atomic Energy of Canada, as Director of the Applied Science Division. He has also served as Mitsubishi Professor at the University of Tokyo, the Burgers Professor at TU Delft, and at ETH Zurich. He has served on several advisory boards: NASA Fluid Physics, the oil-industry Flow Assurance Consortium, and the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, congressionally mandated to advise on nuclear facilities.
