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Dartmouth Engineering Professor Named National Academy of Inventors Charter Fellow

December 18, 2012

Eric Fossum, Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth, has been named a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

NAI Fellow status is accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society.

The 98 innovators elected to NAI Fellow status represent 54 universities and non-profit research institutes. Together, they hold more than 3,200 U.S. patents. 

Professor Fossum is one of the world's experts in solid-state image sensors. He invented the CMOS active pixel image sensor used in almost all cell-phone cameras, webcams, many digital-still cameras and in medical imaging, among other applications. He worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was CEO of two successful high tech companies and is a serial entrepreneur. His interests at Dartmouth are teaching and researching the next generation of solid-state image sensors for gigapixel cameras and for 3D image capture, as well as coordinating Dartmouth's Ph.D. Innovation Program.

The NAI Charter Fellows will be inducted by the U.S. Commissioner for Patents, Margaret A. Focarino, from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, during the 2nd Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors, on Feb. 22, 2013, in Tampa, Fla., at the Embassy Suites Hotel in the University of South Florida Research Park. Fellows will be presented with a special trophy and a rosette pin. 

The NAI Charter Fellows will be recognized in a full page advertisement in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Jan. 18, 2013, in the Jan. 2013 issue of Inventors Digest, and in a future issue of Technology and Innovation – Proceedings of the National Academy of Inventors.