Robert Smilowitz, an alumnus of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. NAE members, who number more than 2600, are highly accomplished engineering professionals representing a broad spectrum of engineering disciplines working in business, academia, and government.
Smilowitz (MS 73, PhD 77) currently serves as Senior Principal, Protective Design & Security at Thornton Tomasetti in New York City and has more than four decades of experience performing structural vulnerability assessments and blast engineering services for U.S. embassies, federal courthouses and office buildings, airline terminals and a wide variety of institutional and commercial structures around the world. Per an official NAE press release, he is being elected to the academy for, “protecting lives from acts of terrorism through vulnerability assessment, threat mitigation, and building standards development.”
A structural engineering alumnus, Smilowitz also received the Civil and Environmental Engineering Alumni Association Distinguished Alumni Award in 2005.
Smilowitz and the rest of the 2025 class, which includes civil and environmental engineering professor Marcelo Garcia, will be inducted as official members on Oct. 5 at the NAE’s national meeting in Washington, D.C.