Engineers and computer scientists

René Vidal (computer scientist)

René Vidal is a computer vision and machine learning researcher, the Rachleff University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an Amazon Scholar, known for generalized principal component analysis and subspace clustering.

Reshef Tenne

Reshef Tenne is an Israeli materials scientist and professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, known for the 1992 discovery of inorganic fullerene-like nanoparticles and nanotubes of tungsten disulfide.

Reuben H. Kraft

Reuben H. Kraft is an American computational biomechanics researcher who models how mechanical forces damage the human brain, and a Penn State professor since 2013 who won a Presidential Early Career Award.

Reuel Shinnar

Reuel Shinnar (1923–2011) was an Austrian-born American chemical engineer, a longtime City College of New York professor elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985.

Rex A. Elder

Rex A. Elder, also known as Rex Alfred Elder, was an American hydraulic engineer who spent 31 years at the Tennessee Valley Authority and later led Bechtel's hydraulics group.

Oct 26, 2026

Reynold Xin

Reynold Xin, Canadian computer scientist, is a Databricks co-founder and Chief Architect who designed Apache Spark's DataFrames, Project Tungsten, GraphX, and Structured Streaming, and led the 2014 100 TB sort world record.

Reza Shahbazian‐Yassar

Reza Shahbazian-Yassar is a mechanical and materials engineer and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who studies battery materials with in situ electron microscopy.

Ricardo B. Schwarz

Ricardo B. Schwarz, who publishes as Ricardo Blum Schwarz, is a materials physicist and LANL Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory known for bulk metallic glasses.

Ricardo Dobry

Ricardo Dobry, born 1937, is a Chilean-born geotechnical earthquake engineer and longtime Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.

Richard A. Cairncross

Richard A. Cairncross, also known as Richard Allan Cairncross, is an American chemical engineer at Drexel University who won a 1996 PECASE award for simulation research.

Richard A. Vaia

Richard A. Vaia is an American materials scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory, a pioneer of polymer nanocomposites elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

Richard Battin

Richard Battin (1925–2014) was an American aerospace engineer at MIT and Draper Laboratory who led the design of the Apollo guidance and navigation systems, enabling the 1969 lunar landing.

Richard Blahut

Richard E. Blahut, born 1937, is an American information theorist known for the Blahut–Arimoto algorithm, a 30-year IBM career, and professorship at the University of Illinois.

Richard Brent Gillespie

Richard Brent Gillespie is a mechanical engineer and roboticist, professor at the University of Michigan, whose Haptix Lab studies haptic interfaces and neuroprosthetic hand control.

Richard C. Scherrer

Richard C. Scherrer (1919–2018) was an American aeronautical engineer elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 for stealth designs that led to the F-117A.

Richard Chao-Fan Chu

Richard Chao-Fan Chu, known as Dick Chu, was a Chinese-born American mechanical engineer at IBM who pioneered electronic cooling, holding over 200 patents and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987.

Richard Collom Singleton

Richard Collom Singleton (c. 1928 – 2007) was an American mathematical statistician and computer scientist who spent 39 years at SRI International and published mixed-radix fast Fourier transform algorithms.

Richard D. Braatz

Richard D. Braatz is the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 for work on manufacturing control.

Richard D. James

Richard D. James, also published as R. D. James, is a mechanician and mathematician, Distinguished McKnight University Professor at Minnesota, known for shape-memory materials and the 2013 low-hysteresis alloy.

Richard D. Tabors

Richard D. Tabors is an American energy-systems economist whose theory of spot pricing of electricity became the basis for locational marginal pricing and financial transmission rights.

Richard D. Woods (scientist)

Richard D. Woods (1935–2021) was an American geotechnical engineer at the University of Michigan who helped establish soil dynamics and co-authored the 1970 textbook Vibrations of Soils and Foundations.

Richard E. Korf

Richard E. Korf is an American computer scientist and UCLA professor emeritus whose 1985 IDA algorithm enabled memory-efficient heuristic search, yielding the first optimal Rubik's Cube solutions.

Richard E. Ladner

Richard E. Ladner is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington, known for Ladner's 1975 theorem and for co-founding AccessComputing.

Richard E. Palmer

Richard E. Palmer is a British nanoscale physicist and materials scientist, head of the Nanomaterials Lab at Swansea University and professor at Nanjing University, known for size-selected atomic clusters and nanocatalysis.

Richard E. Stearns

Richard Edwin Stearns (1936–2026) was an American computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, founded computational complexity theory in their 1965 paper, work recognized by the 1993 Turing Award.

Richard G. Baraniuk

Richard G. Baraniuk is an American electrical engineer and signal processing researcher at Rice University, known for compressive sensing, the single-pixel camera, and founding OpenStax.

Richard G. Folsom

Richard G. Folsom was an American mechanical engineer and fluid dynamics researcher who taught at UC Berkeley and served as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1958 to 1971.

Richard G. Luthy

Richard G. Luthy (1945–2025) was an American environmental engineer and Stanford professor who pioneered in-situ treatment of contaminated sediments and directed the NSF center ReNUWIt.

Richard H. Frenkiel

Richard H. Frenkiel, born in 1943, is an American engineer who helped design the first US cellular telephone system at Bell Labs and later taught at Rutgers.