National Inventors Hall of Fame Class of 2017

Iver Anderson, a metallurgist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and professor at Iowa State University, focuses his research on powder metallurgy, rapid solidification, and joining problems. He led the team that invented a lead-free solder alloy that has been adopted throughout industry and is now found in most consumer electronics.

Iver Anderson's Bio

Inventor Don Arney created the Bambi Bucket® in the early 1980s. Although using helicopters and large containers or buckets to fight fires was not new, the Bambi Bucket introduced an efficient collapsible bucket fully controllable by the pilot, offering improved water delivery to a targeted area of the fire.

Don Arney's Bio

Carolyn Bertozzi is recognized as the inventor responsible for a field called bioorthogonal chemistry, which allows researchers to chemically modify molecules within living systems. Bertozzi coined the term in 2003 to describe reactions that do not interfere with cells’ biology.

Carolyn Bertozzi's Bio

Eli Harari is the inventor of the Floating Gate EEPROM and co-inventor of System-Flash. His work served as the foundation for transforming flash memory into a highly versatile portable mass- storage media, and led to the development and commercialization of the compact, low-cost flash memory that is found today in the vast majority of portable electronic devices. Harari founded SanDisk and served as its CEO for 22 years until his retirement in 2010.

Eli Harari's Bio

Marshall Jones, a mechanical engineer at General Electric (GE), pioneered the use of lasers for industrial materials processing, particularly in the welding, drilling, and cutting of metals at a time when lasers were uncommon in materials processing. He invented novel methods to weld dissimilar metals, and developed fiber optic systems that made lasers much more convenient for industrial applications.

Marshall Jones' Bio

In the late 1990s, MIT mathematics professor Dr. Tom Leighton and his graduate student Danny Lewin (pictured on next slide) recognized that a solution to freeing up web congestion could be found using applied mathematics and algorithms. Leighton and Lewin invented the methods needed to intelligently replicate and deliver content over a large network of distributed servers, technology that would ultimately solve what was becoming a frustrating problem for Internet users known as the “World Wide Wait.” Almost 20 years later, their innovations, and the company they founded, Akamai, still lead the field.

Tom Leighton's Bio

Frances Ligler is recognized for her innovative application of emerging technologies in a variety of fields to make optical biosensors smaller, more versatile, and more sophisticated. Thanks to her work conducted at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), biosensors have moved out of the lab and into use for food safety, disease diagnosis, pollution control and homeland security.

Frances Ligler's Bio