Indian American academician Azad M. Madni, has been awarded the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 2023 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for innovation in engineering and technology education. The prize recognizes leaders in academia, who have developed new educational approaches to engineering.
The prize recognized Madni for "creating and disseminating a transdisciplinary systems engineering education paradigm based on leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, convergence, social awareness, and diverse thinking and backgrounds," the award citation noted.
A faculty member at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Madni was elected to the NAE in 2021. He has founded the Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering Education (TRASEE™), which integrates concepts from disciplines such as cognitive psychology, biology, economics and decision analysis into engineering coursework.
According to NAE, Madni transformed teaching approach at USC by leveraging “principles of storytelling” from entertainment and the arts, and role-playing from simulations and gaming environments to enable students to appreciate the nuances and understand the different perspectives of problems in engineering.
The founder and CEO of Intelligent Systems Technology, Inc., a high-tech R&D company specializing in transdisciplinary approaches to scientific and societal problems of national and global significance, Madni is an award-winning academician and researcher, who has served as principal investigator on 97 R&D projects totaling over $100M in funding.
Additionally, Madni is chief systems engineering advisor to Aerospace Corporation and a former distinguished visiting fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Space Microelectronics Center. He is also a fellow of reputed engineering and science societies including AAAS, IEEE, AIAA, INCOSE, and IISE.
“We are thrilled that our distinguished colleague Azad Madni received the 2023 NAE Gordon Prize. Azad has pioneered systems engineering as a fundamentally transdisciplinary field encompassing socio-technical and human-centric aspects. His recognition is fitting, well-deserved and exhilarating,” said Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering,
