ASME Fellow Charles Vest named sole candidate for NAE presidency

The nominating committee of the National Academy of Engineering has recommended Charles M. Vest as the Academy's next president. Vest is a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the school's president emeritus. He is also a Fellow of ASME.

Charles M. Vest

Vest was recommended unanimously as the committee's only candidate. The NAE membership will vote for its president in March of next year.

If he is elected, as is likely, Vest will begin serving a six-year term on July 1, 2007.

He will succeed William A. Wulf, who will complete his second term as NAE president on June 30. NAE said its bylaws bar anyone from serving a third term. Wulf became the Academy's interim president in 1996, when he filled an unexpired term, and was elected president in 1997.

Wulf will return to the University of Virginia, where he is the AT&T Professor of Computer Science.

According to a profile published on MIT's Web site, "Dr. Vest served as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1990 through 2004. During this time, he placed special emphasis on enhancing undergraduate education, exploring new organizational forms to meet emerging directions in research and education, building a stronger international dimension into education and research programs, developing stronger relations with industry, and enhancing racial and cultural diversity at MIT."

According to the NAE, its president is a full-time employee who works at the Academy's headquarters in Washington, D.C. The NAE president is also vice chair of the National Research Council, the research organization of the National Academies.

Vest was a member of the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which completed its work in 2005. He led a Department of Energy task force on science programs in 2002 and 2003 and chaired a presidential advisory commission on the redesign of the International Space Station in the early '90s. Vest has been an officer of the Council on Competitiveness and of the Association of American Universities, and is now on the U.S. Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

He has been a member of ASME since 1963.

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