Board Member, 2001-2022Thomas E. Everhart

Thomas E. Everhart is President Emeritus and also Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, Emeritus of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He received an A.B. degree in physics in 1953 from Harvard University, his M.Sc. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1955, and earned a Ph.D. in engineering from Cambridge University in 1958, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Dr. Everhart joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1958, where he served in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for more than 20 years. In addition to teaching and research in scanning electron microscopy and micro-fabrication, he served as chairman of the department during 1972-77. In January 1979, he became Joseph Silbert Dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In August 1984 he became Chancellor at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois where he remained until accepting the presidency at the California Institute of Technology in September 1987. He became President and Professor Emeritus on October 15, 1997. From February until July 1998, he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in England. He also holds a guest appointment at the University of California at Santa Barbara as Senior Advisor to the Chancellor and Distinguished Visiting Professor. He is the Senior Scientific Adviser to the W. M. Keck Foundation.

Dr. Everhart has chaired the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Scientific and Educational Advisory Committee, the General Motors Science Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Engineering Committee on Membership, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the Council of Presidents of the URA Board of Trustees and the Harvard Board of Overseers. He has served on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Universities, the National Academy of Engineering Council, as Vice-Chairman of the Council on Competitiveness, and on the Board of Directors of KCET, the Los Angeles public television station.

His industrial involvement has included service on the Boards of General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Agilent Technologies, Hughes Electronics, Raytheon, as well as smaller, not-yet-public companies. He is a member of the W. M. Keck Foundation Board of Directors, the Kavli Foundation Board of Directors and a Senior member of the Caltech Board of Trustees. He has been a NSF Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tuebingen in Germany and a Guggenheim Fellow at Osaka and Waseda Universities in Japan as well as Cambridge University in England. He has served on review committees for RIKEN in Japan and for the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of The Royal Academy of Engineering (Great Britain).

His main areas of interest and expertise have been in the research and development of scanning electron microscopes, electron beams as applied to semiconductor analysis and fabrication, and basic science and engineering relating to these subjects. While a doctoral student at Cambridge University he invented the detector still in use in scanning electron microscopes. In 1984, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) honored him with its Centennial Medal. In 1989 he received the Benjamin Garver Lamme Award from the American Society for Engineering Education. The University of California at Berkeley awarded him the Clark Kerr Award recognizing his contributions to the advancement of higher education in May of 1992 and the Founder’s Award in April of 1995 from the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley. In 2002, the IEEE awarded him its Founder’s Medal and he was honored with the Okawa Prize.