V11n2 Newsflash 3Both and Thomas Edison. Bill Gates and Jane Goodall. Marie and Pierre Curie. In the past 140 years, these are a few of the leaders in science and technology recognized by the Franklin Institute, which honors the spirit of inquiry and discovery embodied by Ben Franklin. Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh received a Franklin Medal last year, and this year, two Carnegie Mellon professors have joined that prestigious list: Edmund Clarke and Mark Kryder.

Both Clarke and Kryder joined the CMU faculty more than 30 years ago; today, their offices are a stone’s throw from each other on the Pittsburgh campus: Clarke in the Gates-Hillman Complex and Kryder in Roberts Engineering Hall. Although both have received Franklin Institute awards for their contributions to information technology, their areas of expertise are quite different.

V11n2 Newsflash 13Clarke, who joined CMU in 1982, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science. His early work in model checking provided automated means for identifying design errors in hardware and software. Today, he is extending model checking and similar techniques to analyze the complex computer systems used in communications, medicine, and transportation. Clarke has received the Franklin Institute’s 2014 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science.

Starting at CMU in 1978, Kryder, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has focused on magnetic data storage. Later, he served as Seagate Technology’s senior vice president of research and chief technical officer. While he was at Seagate, the company introduced an innovative perpendicular recording technology for hard drives, which significantly increases their storage capacity. For that work, Kryder is a co-recipient (with Shun-ichi Iwasaki of the Tohoku Institute of Technology) of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.  
— Aaron Jentzen (DC’12)