Engineers and computer scientists

Riki Kobayashi

Riki Kobayashi was an American chemical engineer and Louis Calder Professor at Rice University from 1951, whose natural gas measurements became industry standards and earned him National Academy of Engineering election in 1995.

Risto Miikkulainen

Risto Miikkulainen is a computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and VP of AI Research at Cognizant AI Lab, best known as co-inventor of the NEAT neuroevolution method.

Oct 26, 2026

Ritchie Vink

Ritchie Vink is a Dutch engineer who created the Polars DataFrame library in Rust (first commit 23 June 2020) and co-founded Polars BV in Amsterdam with Chiel Peters in 2023, raising a $4M seed and a €18M Accel-led Series A.

Ritu Raman

Ritu Raman is an American mechanical engineer at MIT who works on biohybrid robotics and 4D tissue engineering, building machines powered by living muscle; she received the Presidential Early Career Award in 2025.

Rob Fergus

Rob Fergus is a computer scientist and NYU professor known for spectral hashing and camera-shake removal, who co-founded Facebook AI Research and became its head in 2025.

Rob Pike

Rob Pike, also known as Robert Pike, is a Canadian-born American software engineer best known for co-creating the Go programming language at Google in 2009.

Robert A. Brown

Robert A. Brown is an American chemical engineer, president emeritus of Boston University, known for modeling semiconductor crystal growth and elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Robert A. Frosch

Robert A. Frosch was an American theoretical physicist and research administrator who led NASA from 1977 to 1981 and launched the field of industrial ecology in 1989.

Robert A. Henle

Robert A. Henle was an American electrical engineer at IBM who led IBM's entry into semiconductor main memory and received the 1987 IEEE Edison Medal.

Robert A. House

Robert A. House is a British battery materials chemist and Associate Professor of Materials at the University of Oxford, known for oxygen-redox cathodes and sodium-ion battery research.

Robert A. Laudise

Robert A. Laudise (1930–1998) was an American materials scientist who spent his career at Bell Laboratories, developing the hydrothermal process that made synthetic quartz crystals manufacturable for electronics.

Robert A. Pucel

Robert A. Pucel is an American microwave engineer who spent 38 years at Raytheon developing gallium arsenide MMIC technology and shared the 2005 IEEE Microwave Pioneer Award.

Robert A. Rapp

Robert A. Rapp is an American metallurgist who taught at Ohio State from 1963 to 1995 and is known for his work on high-temperature oxidation and hot corrosion of metals.

Robert A. Scholtz

Robert A. Scholtz is an American electrical engineer and Fred H. Cole Professor at the University of Southern California, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for contributions to spread-spectrum and ultra-wideband communication.

Robert A. Wagner

Robert A. Wagner (1941–2018) was an American computer scientist and Duke professor who co-authored the Wagner–Fischer algorithm, the standard dynamic-programming method for edit distance, in 1974.

Robert Adler

Robert Adler (1913–2007) was an Austrian-born American physicist who spent nearly six decades at Zenith Electronics and created the ultrasonic wireless TV remote control, holding about 180 US patents.

Robert Alan Pritzker

Robert Alan Pritzker (1926–2011) was an American industrial engineer and manufacturing executive who built the Marmon Group of Chicago into the 19th largest private company in the United States.

Robert B. Fridley

Robert B. Fridley (1934–2006) was an American agricultural engineer at UC Davis known for mechanized fruit harvesting and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985.

Robert B. Gilbert

Robert B. Gilbert is a geotechnical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for risk-based engineering.

Robert B. Ross

Robert B. Ross is an American computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory known for parallel file systems and I/O research, and a 2004 PECASE award winner.

Robert Bowie Owens

Robert Bowie Owens (1870–1940) was an American electrical engineer who led the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Maryland Academy of Sciences, with debated credit for discovering radon.

Robert Byron Bird

Robert Byron Bird (1924–2020) was an American chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, best known as coauthor of Transport Phenomena and for kinetic theory of polymeric fluids.

Robert C. Duncan

Robert C. Duncan (1923–2003) was an American engineer and engineering manager who led Apollo guidance and control at NASA, managed the Polaroid SX-70 camera, and directed DARPA.

Robert C. Earlougher Jr.

Robert C. Earlougher Jr. (1941–2011) was an American petroleum engineer who spent his career at Marathon Oil and wrote Advances in Well Test Analysis, the 1977 SPE monograph still used as a textbook.

Robert C. Gooding

Robert C. Gooding (1918–1999) was an American naval engineer and Navy vice admiral who served as the first commander of the Naval Sea Systems Command from 1974.

Robert C. McMaster

Robert Charles McMaster (1913–1986) was an electrical engineer and pioneer of nondestructive testing, professor of welding engineering at Ohio State and editor of the Nondestructive Testing Handbook.

Robert C. Prim

Robert C. Prim (1921–2021) was an American mathematician and computer scientist at Bell Laboratories, known for Prim's algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees, published in 1957.

Robert C. Reid

Robert C. Reid, or Robert Clark Reid, was an American chemical engineer and MIT professor best known as co-author of The Properties of Gases and Liquids.

Robert C. Sprague

Robert C. Sprague (1900–1991) was an American electronics engineer who founded the Sprague Electric Company in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1926, a leader in capacitors and semiconductors.