Charles Stark Draper Prize

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Draper Prize,^[1] which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Engineering"—the others are the Academy's Russ and Gordon Prizes. The Draper Prize is awarded biennially and the winner of each of these prizes receives $500,000.^[2] The Draper prize is named for Charles Stark Draper, the "father of inertial navigation", an MIT professor and founder of Draper Laboratory.

1989: and Robert N. Noyce for their independent development of the monolithic integrated circuit

Jack S. Kilby

1991: Sir and Hans von Ohain for their independent development of the turbojet engine

Frank Whittle

1993: for his development of FORTRAN, the first widely used, general purpose, high-level computer language^[3]

John Backus

1995: and Harold A. Rosen for their development of communication satellite technology

John R. Pierce

1997: for his invention of "platforming"

Vladimir Haensel

1999: , Robert D. Maurer, and John B. MacChesney for the development of fiber optics

Charles K. Kao

2001: , Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts for the development of the Internet

Vinton G. Cerf

2002: for the bioengineering of revolutionary medical drug delivery systems^[4]

Robert Langer

2003: and Bradford W. Parkinson for their work developing the Global Positioning System

Ivan A. Getting

2004: , Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor, and Charles P. Thacker for their work on Alto, the first practical networked computer

Alan C. Kay

2005: , Francis J. Madden, Edward A. Miller, James W. Plummer, and Don H. Schoessler for the design, development, and operation of Corona, the first space-based Earth observation systems

Minoru S. "Sam" Araki

2006: and George E. Smith for the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), a light-sensitive component at the heart of digital cameras and other widely used imaging technologies

Willard S. Boyle

2007: for developing the World Wide Web^[5]

Tim Berners-Lee

2008: for developing the Kalman filter^[6]

Rudolf E. Kálmán

2009: for his invention and contributions to the development of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), used universally in computers and other data processing and communication systems^[7]

Robert H. Dennard

2011: and Willem P.C. Stemmer for their individual contributions to directed evolution, a process that allows researchers to guide the creation of certain properties in proteins and cells. This technique has been used in food ingredients, pharmaceuticals, toxicology, agricultural products, gene delivery systems, laundry aids, and biofuels

Frances H. Arnold

2012: , Wolfgang Helfrich, Martin Schadt, and T. Peter Brody for their contributions to the development of liquid crystal display (LCD) technologies

George H. Heilmeier

2013: , Martin Cooper, Yoshihisa Okumura (奥村善久), Richard H. Frenkiel, and Joel S. Engel – mobile phone pioneers who laid the groundwork for cellular telephone networks (GSM) and today's smartphone.^[8]

Thomas Haug

2014: , Yoshio Nishi (西美緒), Rachid Yazami and Akira Yoshino (吉野彰) – rechargeable battery pioneers who laid the groundwork for today's lithium ion battery.

John Goodenough

2015: , M. George Craford, Russell Dupuis, Nick Holonyak, Jr. and Shuji Nakamura for the invention, development, and commercialization of materials and processes for light-emitting diodes (LEDs).^[9]^[10]

Isamu Akasaki

2016: for development of the Viterbi algorithm, its transformational impact on digital wireless communications, and its significant applications in speech recognition and synthesis and in bioinformatics.^[11]

Andrew J. Viterbi

2018: for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language.^[12]

Bjarne Stroustrup

2020: and C. Grant Willson for the invention, development, and commercialization of chemically amplified materials for micro- and nanofabrication, enabling the extreme miniaturization of microelectronic devices.^[13]

Jean Fréchet

2022: , John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson and Sophie M. Wilson for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips.^[14]

Steve B. Furber

2024: for engineering spintronic technologies, enabling digital information storage that serves as a foundation for today’s data-driven world.^[15]

Stuart Parkin

The NAE website shows that no Draper Prize was awarded in 2010, 2017, 2019 or 2021.^[16] Since the award is a biennial one, it was probably only given in even years beginning in 2016. The Russ Prize, also from the NAE, is awarded in odd years.