IEEE Awards Booklet - 2023 - 15

2023 IEEE MEDALS
IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr.
Education Medal
Sponsored by MathWorks, Lockheed Martin
and the IEEE Life Members Fund
IEEE Medal for Innovations
in Healthcare Technology
Sponsored by the IEEE Engineering
in Medicine and Biology Society
James Joseph Truchard
Rebecca Richards-Kortum
For the development of LabVIEW and
establishing worldwide programs to
enhance hands-on learning in
laboratories and classrooms
As an engineer, business owner, and global technical leader,
James Joseph Truchard has always been driven by a vision to
empower engineers to be more innovative and efficient-and his
work to make that vision a reality has had enormous worldwide
impact. He cofounded National Instruments (NI), a software and
hardware company that has been remarkably successful in developing
products that aid engineers in general-and engineering
students in particular. NI's best-known invention is LabVIEW,
which changed engineering education in the mid-1980s when
it was released. LabVIEW was a breakthrough that made sophisticated
instrumentation accessible to unsophisticated users.
Its central innovation was the concept of graphical programs,
in which instrumentation systems are constructed by wiring
together icons on a screen rather than writing low-level C code,
the prevalent method at the time. This allowed students with little
or no experience to set and use sophisticated measurement and
control systems. Truchard recognized, however, due to the novelty
of LabVIEW and the challenges of upgrading instrumentation
in undergraduate labs, that the impact of LabVIEW would be
limited without an accompanying investment in efforts to reduce
the cost of adopting virtual instrumentation. So he created the
Academic Relations Program to bring every engineering and
science student worldwide access to LabVIEW. The technology
was later made accessible to high school students and even young
kids through Robolab, a LabVIEW-based product bundled with
LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits. Over the past few decades,
engineers and scientists from " grade school to grad school " and
throughout the professional industry have been empowered by
Truchard's innovations to design and build systems in a fraction
of the time and cost of traditional programming approaches.
LabVIEW has been adapted to a wide variety of industry applications,
from automotive to medical. It has enabled power sources
in remote African villages and early-detection methods for cancer.
Just as impressive is the impact Truchard has made in technical
education and in motivating untold numbers of young children
worldwide to pursue careers in science and engineering.
An IEEE Fellow, Truchard is the founder and former chairman
and CEO, National Instruments, Austin, Texas, USA.
Scope: For a career of outstanding contributions to education in
the fields of interest of IEEE.
For contributions to optical solutions
for cancer detection and leadership in
establishing the fi eld of global health
engineering
Rebecca Richards-Kortum has not only shown exceptional
creativity in using optical solutions for cancer detection, she
has pioneered an entirely new field: global health engineering.
Guided by a belief that all people deserve access to health
innovation, Richards-Kortum has developed low-cost, high-performance,
life-saving technologies to help vulnerable populations
in low-resource settings around the world. Focusing on diseases
that cause high morbidity and mortality, such as cervical cancer,
premature birth, and malaria, Richards-Kortum and her students
have developed technologies that are now used in over a dozen
countries and are commercially available on four continents.
She led the development of a high-resolution microendoscope
capable of real-time subcellular imaging of epithelial tissue that
clinical trials have shown can improve early diagnosis of esophageal,
oral, and cervical precancer from 29% to 79%, without
reducing sensitivity. A further advantage is that high-resolution
imaging can spare 60% of patients the expensive, painful biopsies
traditionally needed for clinical diagnosis. Richards-Kortum's
group has also integrated advances in nanotechnology and microfabrication
to develop low-cost sensors to detect infectious
diseases like HIV, cryptosporidium, malaria, and tuberculosis. She
led development of novel nucleic-acid tests to enable diagnosis
of HIV in infants in low-resource settings, introducing the first
integrated paper-and-plastic device for isothermal amplification
of DNA. Together with Maria Oden, Richards-Kortum also
led development and dissemination of low-cost technologies to
improve neonatal survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Her low-cost
bubble CPAP device, which treats premature infants with respiratory
distress, delivers the same flow and pressure as systems used
in the U.S., at a 30-fold cost reduction. Clinical evaluation has
shown the device improves survival rates from 24% to 65% and
it has now been implemented nationwide in Malawi, and sold
in over 35 other countries. Richards-Kortum's multidimensional
work has changed the nature of biomedical engineering and the
world is a better place thanks to her many accomplishments.
An IEEE Senior Member, Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm
Gillis University Professor of Bioengineering, Rice University,
Houston, Texas, USA.
Scope: For exceptional contributions to technologies and applications
benefitting healthcare, medicine, and the health sciences.
15 | 2023 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2023

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