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Vol. 24., No. 10 November 20, 1998

THREE ENGINEERING ALUMNI WIN TOP ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS: Michael Attardo Is Given School's Highest Honor, the Egleston Medal (see photo)

By Bob Nelson

IBM executive Michael Attardo, architect Cyril Harris and economist Robert C. Merton were the honorees Nov. 10 in Low Rotunda at the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association awards dinner.

Among more than 300 attendees were three Nobel laureates: Merton, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School, a 1966 alumnus of Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, son of renowned Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton and co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics; Myron S. Scholes, professor emeritus at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and Merton's co-Nobelist, and Horst Stormer, professor of physics and applied physics at Columbia, who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"We had a fantastic event, with our wonderful, dedicated alumni," said Zvi Galil, dean of the Fu Foundation School. "It's not every day that you find three Nobel winners in the same room."

The school's highest honor-the Egleston Medal-was presented to Attardo by Donald Ross, president of the Alumni Association. Attardo earned bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia and is now general manager of IBM's Microelectronics Division, a $7 billion annual business with 20,000 employees. Under his leadership, the company has developed a new generation of semiconductors that use copper instead of aluminum wiring. President George Rupp awarded the Pupin Medal to Harris and Merton "for distinguished service to the nation in science and technology," noting that the medal's namesake, Michael Pupin, "was our university's first world-famous professor of electro-mechanics" whose inventions helped advance long-distance telephones, X-ray photographs, alternating current and underground cables.

Harris, Batchelor Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and professor emeritus of architecture, is an internationally known specialist in the acoustic design of auditoriums for the performing arts, and served as a consultant on the design of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and many others.

Merton and Scholes developed a method to price call options, a model that has found wide application in investment decision-making and is now also used to value insurance contracts and to depreciate physical assets.

Merton's current research is focused on developing finance theory in the areas of capital markets and financial institutions.